Barack Obama And The Social Revolution

            As we are now going through primary after primary and eventually a presidential election, certain questions raised by Wright become again especially current not only in that fact that the new administration of our country will lead, and set the example for many things, including possibly race relations. While this would not normally be considered a major issue of the nation today, the affects of age old racism and segregation haunt our everyday lives and psyche to this day, although perhaps in subtler or in less perceived ways. For example, many would pin the flooding of New Orleans and the subsequent rescue and emergency help efforts to the wall as an event greatly influenced by either subconscious or low lying racism (this sentiment is perhaps epitomized—immortalized?—by Kanye West’s statement, “George Bush hates black people”). It is not only rappers who still feel pressures of an overbearing society. Although Wright citied some works that deal with the topic, I state again: does not the presence of  ghettoes indicate the dehumanization existing today. These are places of the forgotten and the left behind. Mainstream society has no use for them—or hardly anymore, with progress of robotics and other industrial enabling technology less and less emphasis is placed on the value of manual labor (at least American—cheap, Indian is fine but that is another story altogether). I see now that I am straying from my original point about the election.

            This is the first election where minorities have has an immediate, massive, and direct effect on the election at large. At the beginning of the race there were three (four if you count Mormon Huckabee) minorities vying for the presidential nomination. While the number has gone down to two (three), the country is still being confronted by the very real fact it may for the first time ever have a truly minority president—nay, not only a minority president, but a black president at that. Does this mean that America has finally overcome or corrected its behavior in terms of ethnic minorities, specifically Blacks? I don’t think so. I don’t think we as a people, as a whole will ever realize the error of our ways. The stereotypes will never die. They will eventually be changed however. Eventually, be it 10 years or 100, it won’t be Blacks who are stereotypically lazy, violent, or stupid. It will be the whites. Wright was correct in his analysis of the seeds of revolution. While I think the time violent uprisings has come and gone, a social revolution of sorts is stewing right below the surface. The New South doesn’t refer to the reconstruction of the South post-Civil War. The New South and counter-culture movements all over the country are the domain of Blacks and other ethnic minorities that will reshape the land into a completely different social landscape.