Leonard Pitts: ‘We' are finally part of ‘We the People'

[babylonsister]

Leonard Pitts: ‘We' are finally part of ‘We the People'
By LEONARD PITTS JR.
[e-mail]

"For the first time in my adult lifetime I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change." -- Michelle Obama, Feb. 18, 2008


I always thought I understood what Michelle Obama was trying to say.

You are familiar, of course, with what she actually did say, which is quoted above. It provided weeks of red meat for her husband's opponents, who took to making ostentatious proclamations of their own unwavering pride in country.

But again, I think I know what the lady meant to say. Namely, that with her husband, this brown-skinned guy with the funny name, making a credible run for the highest office in the land, she could believe, for the first time, that "we the people'' included her.

It is, for African Americans, an intoxicating thought almost too wonderful for thinking. Yet, there it is. And here we are, waking up this morning to find Barack Obama president-elect of these United States.

In a sense, it is unfair -- to him, to us -- to make Tuesday's election about race. Whatever appeal Obama may have had to African Americans and white liberals eager to vote for a black candidate, is, I believe, dwarfed by his appeal to Americans of all stripes who have simply had enough of the politics of addition by division as practiced by Karl Rove and his disciples, enough of the free floating anger, the holiday from accountability, the nastiness masquerading as righteousness, the sheer intellectual dishonesty, that have characterized the era of American politics that ends here.

But in the end, after all that, there still is race.

And it would be a sin against our history, a sin against John Lewis and Viola Liuzzo, against James Reeb and Lyndon Johnson, against Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King, against all those everyday heroes who marched, bled and died 40 years ago to secure black people's right to vote, not to pause on this pinnacle and savor what it means. It would be a sin against our generations, against slaves and freedmen, against housemen and washerwomen, against porters and domestics, against charred bodies hanging in southern trees, not to be still and acknowledge that something has happened here and it is sacred and profound.

more...

http://www.miamiherald.com/459/story/757163.html

[ShortnFiery]

1. I'm hoping the DIVA, Rahm Emanuel, peeks out of his hidey hole and turns obama down on COS.

THAT would be sweet. We don't need any prima donnas huddling with Obama.

[Demeter]

2. I Think Obama's Plan Is to Get Rahm Out of the Way

He's a major roadblock in the House, and helps keep Pelosi in power. With him gone, she can be defeated.

[yurbud]

3. the only thing close is when Jews became "us" after World War II. The Holocaust stripped away

their foreignness for good.

After hundreds of years, maybe Obama will do that for the way white people will see their black neighbors (whose ancestors have probably been here longer than the white neighbor's).