{"id":1522,"date":"2008-05-21T23:20:42","date_gmt":"2008-05-21T23:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/21\/today-is-my-62n\/"},"modified":"2016-05-10T13:44:32","modified_gmt":"2016-05-10T20:44:32","slug":"today-is-my-62n","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2008\/05\/21\/today-is-my-62n\/","title":{"rendered":"THE OBAMA LANDMARK: RACIAL ATTITUDES ON MY BIRTHDAY"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Obama_older_lady\"<\/a>Today is my 62nd birthday.\u00a0 It’s pretty amazing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 AND who is the first candidate to sit for a video interview with BlogHer<\/a>, thus demonstrating a comprehension of women who blog — and those women who read them.<\/p>\n

Not only that.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And it wasn’t even a big deal.<\/p>\n

You need to realize that in my lifetime as someone old enough to notice – probably the past 40 years — that would have been unthinkable.\u00a0 That a highly regarded TV drama was canceled after one season because it featured a white male and black female social worker<\/a> working together and stations across the south refused to carry it.\u00a0 Slowly, as the Civil Rights movement brought us forward, things changed.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And some of that appears to be true.<\/p>\n

\"Dean_rusk_daughter_2\"<\/a>
\nIn 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.\u00a0 Which wrote this:<\/p>\n

Resignation \u00a0Offer. As recently as 1948, California law would have made the union a criminal offense in the state. Until last June, when the U.S.
\nSupreme Court killed Virginia’s miscegenation law, 16 states still banned interracial marriage. More to the
\npoint, and more poignant, in a year when black-white animosity has reached a
\nviolent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that
\nseparateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.\u2014that to
\nthe marriage of true minds, color should be no impediment. Indrawn as usual,
\nRusk pronounced himself “very pleased.” Clarence Smith, Guy’s father,
\nsaid simply: “Two people in love.”<\/p>\n

That’s right – Rusk offered to resign because of the wedding – that was
\nhow unusual it was.\u00a0 In the early 90s I visited a high school
\nnear Cincinnati, OH, which was once KKK country.\u00a0 I was producing a “space
\nbridge” — a satellite conversation between high schools in Ohio and Moscow.\u00a0 The night
\nbefore the show I gave a reception for the families of the kids featured
\nin the program.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Apparently I was the only one who did though.\u00a0 One of the boys’ parents had divorced and his dad had married this woman who was now the kids’ stepmom.\u00a0 And in the middle of semi-rural Ohio, close to the Kentucky border, nobody cared.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to the Grammys, 1990, this winning song and video, with this kiss.<\/p>\n

<\/object>
\nI 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.<\/p>\n

There’s lots more. But what does all this have to do with a presidential candidate? In Iowa?\u00a0 I don’t know why but as I watched this morning I was so struck by the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime.\u00a0 Probably it’s just the birthday.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 OH and last week I read that there has not been a white male Secretary of State in the US for 11 years!\u00a0 Nobody’s been yelling about that, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is my 62nd birthday.\u00a0 It’s pretty amazing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Not only am I, while still healthy and not … Continue reading THE OBAMA LANDMARK: RACIAL ATTITUDES ON MY BIRTHDAY<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4,27,7,9,97],"tags":[1501,469,1505,1503,1507,1506,1504,1502,92,1196,1026,261,1508],"class_list":["post-1522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aging","category-baby-boom","category-current-affairs","category-life","category-politics","category-television","tag-aaron-neville","tag-civil-rights","tag-dean-rusk","tag-dont-know-much","tag-east-side","tag-interracial-marriage","tag-kkk","tag-linda-ronstadt","tag-obama","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-tv","tag-west-side"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-oy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1522"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4418,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522\/revisions\/4418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}