Wasn't this a reference to some 60's era saying or something. Everybody seemed to laugh along knowingly when he said this?
It's from what we always called the Get Back Blues. I'm not sure whose song it is or if it even has any one author, and that might not be the 'real' title either, but yeah, Lowery opened his benediction by quoting Lift Every Voice And Sing then closed it by quoting the Get Back Blues. Both songs you heard a lot during the Civil Rights Movement, which Lowery was one of the heroes of, he led the Montgomery bus boycott and was one of the Selma march leaders.
Now I want you to tell me, / Brother what you gonna do about old Jim Crow? / Now if you was white, should be all right / If you was brown, could stick around / But if you black, mmm brother, get back get back... So he tinkered with it a little obviously, and at worst I could say it maybe came off a touch schlocky (really now, 'mellow yellow'?), but it was all so much a part of the historic weight of the moment--this 87-year-old civil rights veteran in the winter of his life, standing on the Washington Mall with well over a million Americans of every color and creed gathered around in the freezing cold, having survived long enough to witness the day as a younger black man of a different generation, standing straight and proud and grave and humbled all at once, accepts before everyone the awesome responsibility of having been the one chosen to lead us forward through some very difficult times. That was a huge moment, it will live on in history as a huge moment, even as said difficulties press right on and doubtless no one present, least of all Obama, forgot for an instant they were there.
So does the fear that the more and more
the "other" is included, the more we will be excluded. That there is not enough to go around.
For African Americans it's a monumental moment of recognition and acceptance and for white Americans it represents a monumental shift in their collective capacity to understand and accept others. Both are worthy of one helluva party!
I think these posts get to the heart of it. Recognizing what a wonderful thing it is that this particular door has now been opened to African-Americans, and the potential the highly visible office it comes with has to help further open people's eyes to the potential in everyone...yes of course that also means recognizing why it's taken so long for this to happen--this isn't just about Barack Obama, it's about all of us. And that's something to celebrate! It's not something for anyone to feel defensive or slighted or suspicious over. Justice isn't about helpless victims and irredeemable oppressors and taking sides 'against' people, it's a much bigger dream than that, it's human beings recognizing each other and understanding where each other are coming from and working together to build the kind of society that won't be forgetful of anyone's humanity. But you don't get there by meditating abstractly on how all people are really the same underneath etc. etc., you have to get out there and listen and act and interact and be willing to take a little resentment or defensiveness on the chin sometimes and still keep going. And to have respect for community and how much that means to people, too--how much it hurts when people whose experiences one can really relate to are suffering, how exhilarating it feels when something wonderful for the community happens--without feeling jealous on account of the ties you also share with them. Maybe this is part of the issue; that there isn't a 'white community' in this country in the way there is a black or a gay or a Latino community, and that sometimes this absence is wrongly assumed to be a symptom of enlightenment or progress or just in general a 'way any reasonable person ought to be', when the truth is there never was any such community to begin with, because in this country white people---
qua white people, anyhow--have never had to put aside their differences and organize collectively in the face of a common set of problems. Not that a shared legacy of adversities is all there is to a community, it's often also an affinity for a distinct subculture and all that, but it's the legacy of adversities part that makes these issues charged.
However, I stand by my assertion that people who have strong feelings of racism (or any sort of discriminatory feelings based on gender, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background etc.), lack intelligence. There is no way that any truly intelligent human being could believe that something like the color of one's skin makes them inferior to another person or group of people. I'm not even necessarily talking about people that lack education. There are people with Ph.D's that are horribly racist, and people who have an 8th grade education that aren't. Although, I think it's hard to dispute that lack of education generally makes it more likely for one to hold on to feelings of racism or discrimination. It's also not too presumptive to say that there are a lot of people, especially in the South, who were born into unfortunate socioeconomic circumstances and generations of racism and who haven't had the chance to experience a broader education and view of the world that would lead them to re-examine what they've been taught about race. Once one becomes an adult, though, I don't think there's any excuse to hold onto racist feelings.
Well, I certainly agree with that last part. I don't really agree that intelligence, as in IQ, has much to do with it though. Racism isn't primarily an intellectual proposition, it's a socially and psychologically ingrained habit of mind where received negative assumptions about some collective a person belongs to dominate your perceptions of them, whether you consciously believe those assumptions or not. You can intellectualize your way out of that habit to a point, and yeah education can be a big help with that, but to finish the job you'll have to redirect some of your emotional allegiances too, which is really not something introspection or critical thinking can do for you. And the more segregated your lifestyle and your community is, the harder that's going to be to do. Simply recoiling at people in your own community who are overtly racist isn't enough.
Concerning the role of regional histories specifically in this, I'll just add that when you routinely choose the most stereotypically, (supposedly) familiar and glaring examples of racism in order to illustrate your point, you run the risk of playing into the hands of people who are inclined to dismiss all claims that they've got some blind spots of their own to address, because after all "
I'm obviously not some inbred, coarse, stupid, violent trash 'like those people down there' and how dare you suggest I am."
you, but I'm really surprised by this statement. Should we just chalk it up to "I'm allowed to put down 'my people' but you can't?" 
Enjoy your well-deserved ass-kicking!
