Forward in this generation --triumphantly

As a white heterosexual male, I don't really have much empirical experience of "otherness," unless one cares to count the fact that I work the kinds of jobs that typically require initial screening and vetting by women, many of them black, and gay men. It's hardly oppressive; I have plenty working against me, but I've never been given to wonder, "I'm white, I'm straight and I'm a man --how will I ever cope?"-- but in any case it's impossible to hide the fact that one is an oddball in such circumstances.

In any event, Michelle Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention was to me an utterly extraordinary event. I was exposed, at the age of six and in an all-white school in an affluent suburb of Chicago, to the story of a courageous and selfless Harriet Tubman, and it remains with me to this day. As a twelve-year-old, I watched, in turns mortified, outraged and inspired, the televised presentation of Alex Haley's dramatic encapsulation of the lives of black people upon this land through the generations.

The most interesting and rewarding experience of my four years' pursuit of a bachelor's degree was an independent-study crash course in black American writers dating from Frederick Douglass to now, during which I was putting away a novel or a collection of selected essays or poems every other day for six weeks. The groundings of my conception of what is listenable music are rooted in jazz and the blues, two forms that were born of oppression, dared to rejoice in its face and now stand as everlasting gifts of black American creative artists to the entire Western world.

I have been given, in both heartbroken and optimistic moments of contemplation of matters human, to intone spontaneously the lyrics to Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," its words speaking directly to the theft of his ancestors from their homes for the purpose of generating wealth and progeny for others and their own successors, of building a way of life that is, for better and worse, the inheritance of us all. I relate to the sentiments that he expresses in a vaguely personal way, as though on some level he speaks to things somehow only too well known to me but lying beyond my powers of direct identification.

All of this and the lynchings, the subsequent acquittals by all-white juries, the police dogs, the water cannons, the poll taxes and the literacy tests aside, I know well the stories of redlining and blockbusting, of planned shrinkage and the segregation of school districts into separate and unequal halves, of underservice from the banks and supermarket chains and overservice from the currency exchange and fast-food titans --the sad and sorry legacies of which remain with us to this day; I need only step to the end of my block, cross the boulevard and walk two more blocks to see it up close, thru the same eyes as I did when I first moved to the neighborhood 20 years ago before fleeing after three years of --when I wasn't barricaded inside my studio apartment in hiding from it all-- having no choice but to look at it each day.

As a white man, it pisses me off; were I the same man only black, it well might have driven me past the point of madness long ago. Knowing what at least I do, if any facet of the significance of Michelle Obama's performance last nite somehow was lost on me, I daresay it would be difficult for a knowledgeable observer to identify it. I heard and recognized well her song of freedom, and she sang it to the very core of my being not less than to that of anyone else who looked on.