I’ve been wondering with great expectation, what kind of real
“conversation about race” Mr. Obama will now lead us into, following his
amazing speech a few weeks ago. As part of an interracial family
(my partner of 30 years is Asian, our son is now 20) I have a sense of
just how difficult, and important, this is. Even with our years of
“group process” training, progressive intention and common spiritual
practice, we (mostly me as the white, middle aged, well-employed,
ivy-league-educated, guy) are often sideswiped by persistent
unconsciousness of the effects of asymmetrical privilege and very
different histories. And in the community we live in, in Napa
California, with a hardscrabble blue-collar past (we were mostly the
bedroom for a big Naval shipyard that closed only a decade ago) and a
decidedly Hispanic future (our largest ethnic group in a decade more)
the racial tension just below our nouveau genteel wine country surface
is evident regularly in our local newspaper letters to the editor and
the more extensive blog postings on the paper’s web site. In fact, the
paper’s editor tells me that when some story or other even brushes
against one or another sensitive patch, the email pouch swells with
stuff that never even makes it online, it is so foul.
So it is good, and well done, to make an intelligent, finely felt,
closely observed, personally vulnerable, even courageous speech. But
leading our communities and families into and through this territory
will be far more important, and far more difficult. It will truly
require vast intelligence, feeling, careful observation, vulnerability
and courage. The collective gasp from the nation at this even modest
beginning is a sure sign of just how important this really is.
I am anxious about hopes raised and unmet. And I am thrilled by the
possibility of the challenge engaged. For now I wait with anticipation
Mr. Obama’s next move — I hope he has the opportunity to make it.
Eliot Hurwitz, editor of DharmaCafé’s Sustainable Community section, is Program Manager for the Napa County Transportation and Planning Agency.
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