On the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration I am thinking about race relations in our country and what this new president means to America.
I grew up in a small Quaker neighborhood in Delaware in the sixties that consisted of twelve houses. Three families were African American. Two were Italian, one was Polish, one was German/Chinese and I believe the rest were Caucasian unless my memory is missing something. We were a tight-knit group and it was a wonderful atmosphere for a child to grow up in. When my parents bought the house, they were approached by the neighborhood association and told that if they were prejudiced in any way they were not welcome. This was during a time when most neighborhoods were doing the opposite.
Fast forward to the nineties in Lexington, Kentucky. I was covering race riots that resulted from when a white cop shot and killed a black kid. I inadvertently got caught in the middle of a crowd of angry protestors. I was alone in the projects. They surrounded me, taunted me, tried to steal my cameras, punched me in the head and tried to pull me to the ground. Somehow, I managed to keep my cool, get to my car and drive off, very badly frightened and bruised.
I ended up interviewed on national television and I think the interviewer was a little disappointed that I wasn’t angry and didn’t say anything more divisive. But I honestly believed that I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I could understand their frustration and anger. And there were many blacks there that day that did try to help me.
A year later I worked on a race relations project for the Herald-Leader (see my “Coming Together” post from June). The whole experience left me wondering if we had made any progress at all since Martin Luther King’s time. Of course we have, at least legally, but on a more subtle, personal level---have we?
Today, I have hope. Today, as I see what very-soon-to-be-president Obama has done for our nation I am more proud of my country than I have ever been.
Today I feel like my country comes a little closer to matching that little neighborhood I grew up in.