The Struggle Continues

From an online article in The Smithsonian magazine

By R. T. Andrews

‘Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.’

That sentiment, expressed by Martin Luther King at an Emancipation centennial event in 1962, can be felt across much of the land this morning.

You could sense the nation’s collective sigh of relief last night as the country began the ceremonial transition, from its Tasmanian devil of a president and his wooden sidekick of a veep, to the reassuring presence of an Uncle Joe, accompanied by his potential rock star of a governing partner, Kamala Harris.

‘Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.’

The United States in 1862 was a nation literally at war with itself. Rebels were fighting to preserve a way of life that other parts of the country wanted to leave behind: chattel slavery, religious bigotry, nativism, xenophobia.

For the past four years it seems as if those alternative visions of the world were still being contested. Make America Great Again was a very thin code for a nostalgic call to a past where black people were underfoot, women were in the kitchen, gays were in the closet, and white men were ascendant, under precious few obligations of restraint. Police busted heads on the regular without fear of reprisal, women were silent over all manner of violation, shaming and disbelief being normal consequences for truth telling. Anything outside of an able bodied heterosexual white man was deviant and ‘less than’ by definition.

The irresistible forces of diversity — which is to say, the natural conditions of humankind — have been taking it on the chin and in the solar plexus these last four years. The assault has been played out relentlessly on the airwaves: governance by ego, rooted in confederate nostalgia and counterfeit reality, manipulated offstage as always by forces of unmitigated greed that produce historic wealth inequality.

While the trumpian coronavirus has been momentarily exorcised from the White House, its residence there did incalculable damage to the organs of America: our infrastructure of government, our politics, our society, and our culture.

To expect a Biden administration to restore the status quo that existed before trumpism entered the open sores of our society is fantasy. For the moment we can breathe more easily because the inflammation has receded, that incessant tweeting pain has subsided.

But COVID-19 is still here, wreaking havoc with our health and our economy. To defeat it will require and the immediate attention and intelligent aggression of the new administration, as well as patience by American citizens, who are already fatigued by mask-wearing, social distancing, Zoom meetings, and lost conveniences.

Patience has seldom been a virtue of our national character. While Trump fatigue may be in our rear view mirror, one early measure of the Biden administration will be its ability to forge sufficient consensus around mask-wearing and quarantines while an effective vaccine is developed and distributed.

That won’t be easy. The new president will have a thin margin in the House and implacable opposition in the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may extend some good ol’ boy collegiality towards Biden, a former colleague, but he will continue to stand resolutely in the gap against anything remotely resembling progress.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris superimposed upon the shadow of Norman Rockwell's
1964 illustration of six-year old Ruby Bridges as she was accompanied by US Marshals in the
desegregation of public schools in New Orleans.

Finally, a word on the new Vice President. It is of course far too early to tell, but her elevation to national leadership status may prove to be the most consequential harbinger of a new generation. Barack Obama cracked open a door in a notorious manner, ushering in a twenty-four second “post-racial” America that was immediately followed by in true American fashion by nativistic American backlash. But Kamala Harris, on the strength of black women, has eased into the sidecar seat, from which she is positioned both symbolically and realistically, to change the landscape irrevocably.

To put it another way, there was no guarantee that the Jackie Robinson experiment to integrate major league baseball would succeed. If Obama was Jackie, Kamala is Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente. There is no turning back.

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