On Tuesday, Illinois voters and voters in another 21 states will go to the polls to help choose a Democratic nomi-nee for president. While the major Democratic candidates are beating up on each other and telling everyone that they deserve the vote, this e
This election is about change, and the change is not going to be limited to Washington. The reason so many young people are energized about the Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) candidacy is because they see an opportunity for change, away from the same old order to a New National Order. The New National Order is less about Democrat and Republican, or Black, white and Hispanic, than it is about American.
It is a new order that recognizes that a new generation is ready to take the reins of this country and is not willing to wait for the same old group of older people (who have made a royal mess of everything) to get out of the way. That generation of baby boomers (like me), are children of the riots, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and former President John F. Kennedy assassinations, and Watergate and Vietnam.
They still carry those scars and those biases. That means that same older group of Black leaders will have to either move out of the way, or get moved out of the way. The New National Order will require a whole new view of the world, espe-cially a new view of where Black people see themselves in that world.
It will require a pooling of intelligence and resources. It will make the Congressional Black Caucus obsolete as long as it insists on being the Congressional Black Democrat Caucus. It will make old-line civil rights leaders and old-line civil rights organizations extinct if they cannot apply themselves to the new/old realities of failing schools and increasing neighborhood death tolls and burgeoning prison populations. It is not just Obama.
It is a new generation of progressive people who, to be sure, need some history lessons. But they should not have to wait for those history lessons to retire, to move out of the way, to become the griots — instead of clutching their positions of authority until death snatches it away from them. It will also require a new sensibility about race and gender in the Black community. This election has exposed a schism within the Black community as some Black women were unabashedly backing Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), excited about the possibility of having a woman in the White House.
They seemed to want to regard themselves as female Blacks, rather than Black females, ignoring the fact that before any X- or Ychromosomes aligned themselves to form their gender, their Black great-grandfather and great-grandmother set their race for them. What promise would a Clinton presidency bring to Black women? Probably less than the Condoleezza Rice ascendancy to Secretary of State has meant, yet Black women aren’t rallying around Condi because of the company she keeps.
She’s got the right chromosomes AND she is Black and brilliant. Oh, that’s right, she is Republican, so that old order determines that she has forfeited her Blackness, or her femaleness, or both. The election results in South Carolina showed that quite a few Black female voters in that state saw that former President William J. Clinton sees them as Black first. They moved away from Sen. Clinton in droves and handed Obama a stunning and convincing win. Bill Clinton immediately dismissed their vote as a “Black thang,” comparing Obama’s win to Rev. Jesse Jackson’s in 1984 and 1988.
President Barack Obama may turn out to be a bust. He may botch some hirings and make some mistakes in dealing with the economy and may underestimate just how difficult it will be to dislodge the grip the old order has on the bureaucracy of government. Still, it is hard to imagine him being worse than President George W. Bush. But four years of Obama will bring four years of the New National Order transforming this nation, perhaps even in spite of Obama.
Those four years will see all these new voters and new volunteers and new activists moving into city councils and state houses and Congress. They will be less impressed with party labels and more impressed with collective vision.
They will demand that certain things be fixed – public education system, immigration, urban crime — and some things be broken – treaties with nations that could care less how many of our children die defending them, dependence on fossil fuels and powerlessness in the face of the health care industry. We defy that New National Order at our own risk. If we don’t become a part of it, it will roll right over us.
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