When I am forty-one, I see Barack Obama hoisted onto the shoulders upon shoulders upon shoulders of millions of Black Americans seeking to construct a human column of Blackness so high it can reach the light and maybe diffuse a bit of that light onto us all.
In 2009 President Obama is addressing a joint session of Congress about health care, when white Congressman Joe Wilson, a Republican from South Carolina, interrupts with two shouts of “You lie!”—an act of incivility, a lack of decorum that undermines the very office of the President of the United States. Joe Wilson might as well have called our President “boy.”
When in 2012 Clint Eastwood speaks at the Republican National Convention and uses the prop of an empty chair beside him, which he speaks to as if it is Obama, the chair symbolizes the chair underneath the Black man about to be hanged from a Southern tree.