The First White President by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Read it. Brilliant. Nuanced. Powerful. Essential. I don't want to try to sum it up. I would just say, "read it." And weep?
We are all implicated. It's the Black and the White thing. Totally bound together. Slavery and Genocide. They are the building blocks of our Country. We have never fully reckoned with our History. We are crucified on the cross of those "original sins."
“Race is an idea, not a fact,”- Historian Nell Irvin Painter
I have always been baffled by racism. I subscribe to Dalai Lama's famous dictum: "We are all Human Beings first." We are all unique and at the same time, we are the same. The same substance. The same value. The same flesh, blood & bone. Cosmetic differences are just cosmetic.
For many in my country, the "White President" is an "erasure" of our last "Black President." A tragedy. Racism writ large across the land.
"And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled." - Ta-Nehisi Coates
For many in my country, the "White President" is an "erasure" of our last "Black President." A tragedy. Racism writ large across the land.
"And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled." - Ta-Nehisi Coates
