A MORE PERFECT WAY

A MORE PERFECT WAY
Saturday, April 09, 2011
By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords

The election of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America was surely an “Act of God,” comparable with any miracle in the Bible. This statement is no bluster, nor mere exaggeration. So surreal was Obama’s election, given this nation’s history, this epochal development can only be termed “dream” like. “When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.” Psalm 126:1

In every way our President and his family is “perfect.” No artist could have sketched a more balanced or beautiful First Family. From the most compelling First Lady, Michelle, to their two beautiful daughters, Malia and Sasha, and to their matriarch, the First Grand-Mother, Mrs. Marian Shields Robinson, they all excel! No anthropologist or sociologist could have woven so many disparately fine strands of African and American life into so taut a cable of American power and complexity. Finally, no politician, or foreign policy wonk, could have assembled a more dissembling avatar of insipid American imperial power than the vertiginous Obama’s, whose lives certainly are real, not mirages, to a gaping world!

The President’s academic honors are second to none. Yet, so are his “common touch” bona fides. Rooted in single- parented childhood, his father, was a brilliant, though driven, Kenyan with a Master of Arts degree in economics, from Harvard. Barack Obama, Sr. divorced his white, Wichita, Kansas –born wife, Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who had a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii. She raised him to be a black man with pride in, and knowledge of, his own history and culture.

She is where the real tribute lies. “In an interview, Barack Obama referred to his mother as "the dominant figure in my formative years... The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics."[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Dunham

His father, a Muslim, was inspirational, but absent. His mom, who later remarried, and her parents, being ever present, did the heavy lifting. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

The President’s childhood sojourn in Hawaii and Indonesia with its rosette of races, religions, languages and customs further sensitized him to the “diversity of gifts but the same spirit” 1 Cor. 12:4, which unites and animates all of mankind, as if his own family background was not evidence enough. Then, his studies at Occidental College in California, and his later transfer to Columbia University in New York, prepared him for the pressure cooker job of “community organizer” on the South Side of Chicago.

There, he witnessed, and was emboldened by, the historic and transformative, Harold Washington’s election as Chicago’s first black mayor. And there, in “black metropolis,” he encountered the black church, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ, who became his pastor for over 20 years. It was also there, on the south side of Chicago, that he married his beautiful black wife, conceived his future, and understood his destiny. That destiny was not unlike another former Chicago South Side denizen’s, novelist Richard Wright, author of Native Son, Black Boy, The Outsider and others, all emblematic of densely diverse doyen that is President Barack Obama. Both exploded onto the world stage.

Barack Hussein Obama’s destiny entailed, preliminarily, being accepted into the very prestigious Harvard Law School. There, “Barry” Obama became the first black Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Law Review. In so doing, he reprised and exceeded the sterling example of the great Charles Hamilton Houston, former Dean of Howard Law School, and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Director of Litigation, who was the first black person to become an editor of the Harvard Law Review, after having been a valedictorian at Amherst College in 1915.

Houston is also credited with devising the legal strategy for destroying the “separate but equal” doctrine spawned in 1896 by racist judicial activists in Plessy v. Ferguson, who were intent on repressing the legal and human rights of blacks, in every way. Houston also obtained accreditation for Howard Law School, by the American Bar Association, which, did not permit black members. Lastly, Dean Houston produced the lawyers, the “social engineers” meet for relentless battle, like Thurgood Marshall, Spottswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, George E.C. Hayes, and others, whose litigious largesse culminated in the historic Brown v. Board of Education, victory, which judicially reversed the hated Plessy v. Ferguson.

President Barack Obama personifies the utter destruction, in fact, of that pernicious “separate but equal” doctrine, and that of its one-eyed parent, “white supremacy,” from whose head it sprang, which injures and alienates, and poisons and pollutes, each and every American invidiously and insidiously. His person and his persona tacitly deracinate lingering vestiges of that ideology which actuated American life, until the Civil War; and afterwards, when the Constitutional and statutory “Reconstruction” was betrayed on the table of “white power” rapprochement in 1876, in the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South and white domestic terrorists ran amok freely, in exchange for Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’ assumption of the Presidency.

“Tacit deracination,” or quiescent quashing of repressive racial force fields, however hopeful and invigorating, is not redemptive. More is required. Though the racist ideology may be gone, its malevolent effects bind and blister like a bumble bee’s barb, like Pavlov’s dog, like Schrodinger’s Cat and like the Stockholm Syndrome.

It is in this politically volatile venue, the centuries-long deferred—some would say, “denied”—economic, legal, and political fulfillment of the amended Constitution’s and its enabling statutes’ specific promises of fairness and equality to American-born blacks, which the Judiciary has repeatedly abridged or hobbled, that President Obama will either irreparably establish or irreparably betray his enduring and historic legacy among, and for, the “least of these,” his oft-betrayed, fellow persons of African descent.

Accomplishing this extraordinarily difficult, equitable maneuver, known as restitution, which satisfies blacks without estranging whites and others, is the real reason he was elected. It is the principal, though inaudible, part of the Obama promise of “change we can believe in.” Already, hands-down, the greatest politician in American history, opening up these opportunities; that is, making the union “more perfect” economically, legally and politically, will firmly establish him the greatest President in American history.


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