Let race matter

By Félix Alfonso Peña
© 2008 Félix Alfonso Peña
All rights reserved
13 March, 2008

I thought it was funny when people took issue with Geraldine Ferraro, a fund-raiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for saying that Sen. Barack Obama would not be where he was in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination were it not for his skin color.

In fact, I had some fun with the contretemps in the “Potshots” on 12 March.

After all, we are living in 2008. Save among those deformed thinkers who stand amid the ashes of the Confederacy and the Third Reich and imagine themselves at the gates of paradise, Jim Crow has long since been banished to the history books.

It’s been over two score years since our national conscience was roused out of its pathetic slumber and we declared that people could not inflict a lifetime of poverty and humiliation on others merely because of the color of their skin, their gender or their national origin.

And Ferraro, a liberal, former congresswoman from New York and vice presidential candidate in 1984, didn’t say Obama was inferior. She merely said that his skin color — race, if you prefer that rustic term — helped propel him to the head of the pack in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

I agree with her. Obama is a dazzling speaker and a charismatic person, but to ignore the color of his skin, light brown though he may be, is to ignore reality.

We may say that we’re tired of hearing about color. We may protest that a white person descended from Confederates and slave-owners — yours truly, for example — cannot be held responsible for the sins of those four generations removed.

We may say that we’ve spent billions of dollars ameliorating or trying to remedy the problems of the descendants of slaves, but that what really matters is putting one’s nose to the middle-class grindstone and assimilating into the mainstream world of work and entrepreneurship.

But in the end, I think, many white Americans feel the need for closure on the issue of race.

Perhaps our conscience still feels the burden of those hundreds of thousands of uprooted and destroyed African lives sacrificed on the altar of profits and justified on the basis of conveniently concocted theories of racial inferiority and the excuse that the gift of Christianity was payment aplenty for the injustice of slavery.

Perhaps we feel somewhat ashamed before the world because our inner cities are ghettoes overflowing with impoverished descendants of those slaves and lacking that most basic ingredient for the nostrum of success, hope.

Perhaps we need vindication that, yes, we really have gone beyond the nasty, lingering effects of Jim Crow and signs like the one in Vidor, Texas, that said, as late as the 1960’s, “Nigger don’t let the sun set on you in this town.”

So, given the prospect of voting for a man who needs no handlers to put words in his mouth, whose rapid rise has brought ever more attention to his campaign and whose relative youth in the world of national politics brings us a promise of vitality and change to a system ossified by greed and self-interest, who wouldn’t vote for closure?

I grant that it’s not as simple as voting for a black man, but it’s not as simple as ignoring the color of his skin and 250 years of American history.

My best guess is that three races — black, white and presidential — have come to a crossroads, and they all matter to Americans.

Unfortunately, both Obama and Clinton let race matter the wrong way: as something to be hushed up. The Obama camp, perhaps because they are still fearful of American prejudice against color, took Clinton to task for Ferraro’s observations.

Clinton being Clinton, she caved.

Ferraro, who told CNN that she would continue to speak up, resigned from Clinton’s campaign, saying she had done nothing wrong. Good for her.

Ferraro had it right. Race still matters. What she didn’t say, and what we need to remember, is that it can matter in a good way.