Still miles to go

WHEN I logged into Twitter this morning, I noticed “African Americans” as a topic was trending big time. Hmm, what’s up?

It seems a handful of news orgs had pointed out that the new Senate will no longer have an African American member. As in, zero. That fact sparked the outpouring of chatter on Twitter.

Sooner or later, this event would have surfaced in my mind independently. But it hadn’t yet. And that’s rather – interesting. But it may have something to do with what Blanche K. Bruce (pictured above), the first African American elected to serve a full term in the US Senate, said during a 1876 speech:

“When I entered upon my duties here as Senator from Mississippi, the question ceased to be novel, and had already been elaborately and exhaustively discussed.”

Today, 134 years after Bruce spoke those words on the Senate floor, it is no longer novel to see African Americans wielding political, military, corporate or cultural power anywhere in America. And as to my surprise at my own mild surprise for not automatically thinking "race" when I pondered the makeup of the new Senate, the answer is that my "radar" was turned off. That, I guess, is progress of a sort.

The election of a black man to the nation’s highest office permanently sealed the deal in terms of altering our societal perceptions. Forget about politics for a moment. Obama’s very presence in the Oval Office is as profound as it is historic. Maintaining the old stereotypes in the face of this new reality is now difficult if not impossible for the rational among us. From a black perspective, at least, anything seems possible now. It isn't always about race. That feeling is new. It is liberating. And it sprang fully to life on that sublime election night at Grant Park. When Obama made it, we ALL made it. And that, to me, is the Obama Effect.

None of this means we have reached some post-racial nirvana. Hardly. As long as fear exists, so will racism in some form. One only has to observe certain ugly elements of the Tea Party to see its current face. What has changed is race is no longer the debilitating barrier it was once. But I digress.

Blacks make up 12% of the US population. Our heritage literally dates back to America’s beginnings. So, yes, there is something absolutely wrong with having zero representation in the Senate. No one should be happy about it. Yet, the absence is surely temporary. The election of new black senators is not a question of if but when. It is largely a matter of who (like any other ambitious pol) is batty enough to run and when they choose to do so.

There have only been six black senators in US history. Apart from Obama and Illinois Sen. Roland Burris (appointed to complete Obama’s term), the other four were (in reverse chronological order): Carol Moseley Braun (also of Illinois), Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, and Blanche K. Bruce and Hiram Revels of Mississippi. There are currently 41 black members in the US House.

Before leaving the office in 1881, Sen. Bruce of Mississippi said:

“I have confidence, not only in my country and her institutions, but in the endurance, capacity and destiny of my people … Whatever our ultimate position in the composite civilization of the Republic and whatever varying fortunes attend our career, we will not forget our instincts for freedom nor our love for country.”

Those poignant words gave me goose bumps as I read them. If only this lone black senator had known, in those dark days of Reconstruction, that the future would reward his faith in country and a people’s destiny, in ways he could not possibly imagine. Progress, of course, is a game of inches. And all of us still “have miles to go,” as Robert Frost wrote in his classic poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
...
The woods are lovely, dark and deep;
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.