When The Man is One of Us

I found this article, written by Jack White, to be quite interesting. I've posted some of it, but please read the entire piece. I'm going to refrain from writing how I feel about this particulair subject. Those of you who have been reading for any length of time already know how I feel about the problems in the black community.

When The Man is One of Us

We haven't really been in a place this confusing since 1954, when the NAACP's crusade against segregation culminated in the Brown vs. Board decision... we weren't prepared for the victory... We've spent nearly 60 years since then trying to figure out what kind of relationship we want to have with America...we have seen ourselves as outsiders battling for justice...Our default has been to protest. And while that mindset has served us well, it has, in a flash, been made damn near obsolete by the prospect...that one of us may soon become the most powerful man in the world. If that happens, how can we seriously argue that we're being held back by anything but the limits we place on ourselves?

...like Obama's Father's Day speech urging black men to take more responsibility for their children... They represent the first stirrings of a new consensus that places more emphasis on a public discussion of personal responsibility than on protest, on publicly delving into our own shortcomings and dysfunctional behavior.

There's nothing new about this kind of self-examination... We've bristled when whites in power...joined in the critique of, for example, our soaring rate of out-of-wedlock births... such a self-protective mindset no longer makes sense because Obama is one of us, who has taken part in our private handwringing about the self-inflicted wounds that bedevil segments of the black community. He hasn't said anything most of us haven't heard or said at the dinner table. But now, because Obama is who he is, the whole world is listening in to the conversation.

The attention makes us uncomfortable and disoriented. So does the prospect that one of us might soon be in charge of trying to fix this mess instead of simply complaining about it.

We're not really ready for the day when The Man becomes a black man.