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Ebony And Ivory Live Together In Perfect Harmony
Side By Side On My Piano Keyboard, Oh Lord, Why Don’t We?
—Paul McCartney
It strikes me as an unfortunate bit of necessary shorthand that Barack Obama has been thought of almost exclusively as a “black” man. Barack is biracial. He’s not the first “black president.” He’s the first “black and white president.” That can be a profoundly important fact in helping us all understand our own moral obligation as individuals, and as a nation, to understand and come to terms with the increasing necessity of seeing all men as brothers; all women as sisters; of achieving the brotherhood of all mankind.
Jon Stewart made a humorous bit out of his “biraciality,” by wondering if Barack had trouble in the voting booth— his white self struggling to play the race card against his black self. After the laugh, we recall he is one person of two races, a blended “mutt,” as he recently joked, but one that can become a living, breathing example of how Americans must come together as one people, blending into one race of humanity.
Yes, there’s quite a ways to go before that happens. But never has there been a president of our people like this one; a man uniquely qualified to lift this nation above it’s racial prejudices forever. For he himself, like every biracial couple, is already a product of two human beings who did just that. Now his presidency is a daily reminder that we can, and must do so, too.
Barack Obama has fundamentally redefined what it means to be American in the twenty-first century. Let us rejoice, and take up our part in this unprecedented opportunity.
Barack Obama– our first Afro-Saxon president!