THE OBAMA LANDMARK: RACIAL ATTITUDES ON MY BIRTHDAY

Today is my 62nd birthday.  It’s pretty amazing.  Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness a Democratic primary where a white woman (for the first time) and an African-American man (for the first time) are the major Democratic Presidential candidates.  Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness the probable nomination of the 46 year old product of an interracial marriage, who has lived outside the U.S. in the developing world, and who is running on a platform of unity and commitment to helping our country have a better future.  AND who is the first candidate to sit for a video interview with BlogHer, thus demonstrating a comprehension of women who blog — and those women who read them.

Not only that.  This morning, half-awake, watching C-Span footage of the Obama Iowa rally last night, I saw a nice white Iowa lady of a certain age, like the one in this photo, put one hand on either site of Obama’s face and kiss him on the forehead.  And it wasn’t even a big deal.

You need to realize that in my lifetime as someone old enough to notice – probably the past 40 years — that would have been unthinkable.  That a highly regarded TV drama was canceled after one season because it featured a white male and black female social worker working together and stations across the south refused to carry it.  Slowly, as the Civil Rights movement brought us forward, things changed.  And here, I’m really only talking about symbols – not all those individual life moments that remain so difficult for so many. I believe that when symbols change, real change will follow.  And some of that appears to be true.

In September of 1967 Peggy Rusk, daughter of then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, married Guy Smith – and it was so unusual it made the cover of TIME Magazine.  Which wrote this:

Resignation  Offer. As recently as 1948, California law would have made the union a criminal offense in the state. Until last June, when the U.S.
Supreme Court killed Virginia’s miscegenation law, 16 states still banned interracial marriage. More to the
point, and more poignant, in a year when black-white animosity has reached a
violent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that
separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to
the marriage of true minds, color should be no impediment. Indrawn as usual,
Rusk pronounced himself “very pleased.” Clarence Smith, Guy’s father,
said simply: “Two people in love.”

That’s right – Rusk offered to resign because of the wedding – that was
how unusual it was.  In the early 90s I visited a high school
near Cincinnati, OH, which was once KKK country.  I was producing a “space
bridge” — a satellite conversation between high schools in Ohio and Moscow.  The night
before the show I gave a reception for the families of the kids featured
in the program.  As they wandered in, there in the middle of Ohio, I noticed that one couple was comprised of a white man and an African American woman.  Apparently I was the only one who did though.  One of the boys’ parents had divorced and his dad had married this woman who was now the kids’ stepmom.  And in the middle of semi-rural Ohio, close to the Kentucky border, nobody cared.  I guess you’d need to have been around for canceled TV shows and Secretaries of State offers to resign, to be so struck by what happened.

Fast forward to the Grammys, 1990, this winning song and video, with this kiss.

I guess it’s just that we forget how bad things used to be; a kiss like Neville and Ronstadt’s once could ruin both careers.

There’s lots more. But what does all this have to do with a presidential candidate? In Iowa?  I don’t know why but as I watched this morning I was so struck by the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime.  Probably it’s just the birthday.  Whatever happens in the campaign, and I am worried about the race stuff that came out of Kentucky and West Virginia, it was a reminder that at least things are better than they were before.  OH and last week I read that there has not been a white male Secretary of State in the US for 11 years!  Nobody’s been yelling about that, either.