Tonight is the last night of Obama’s presidency and Kristen and I have joined a couple of friends at Marc Avon Evans’ Acoustic Thursdays at Peace and a Cup a Joe. I didn’t realize how much I needed to be here.
As always, it’s a stunning night of talent. Heavy on spoken word backed by Marc’s Little Big Band (or are they the Big Little Band? I never remember) with nothing from my usual singer/songwriter set but me. A lot of soul. A lot of R&B. A whole lot of big beautiful Baltimore blackness all rallied around Marc’s larger-than-Life persona.
It’s perfect combination of the somehow non-threatening and yet unedited hip hop scene that I long to be a greater part of. It’s the kind of night in which I think some of my friends could come to truly grasp #BlackLivesMatter.
And yeah, it’s the last night of Obama’s presidency, and we’ve sort of skirted around it most of the night. Someone brought it up at the beginning. I play my song “Spring” which had people nodding and giving me a firm Hell yeah to – its politics further underlined by Chuck the Mad Ox laying a rhyme in the middle, full of piss and rage and… well… Trump makes it easy… more piss.
But a poet close to the end of the night slams it all home.
I don’t think that the majority of America, by definition, truly understand what it means to not have a role model modeled after you. Rowan and I talked a couple of weeks ago about how difficult it is to grow up on Tolkien and to know about the light and the fair and the just verses the swarthy dark and evil – and to know exactly which side of the equation it sounds like you should belong to. About how powerful it was to be able to craft a role playing game character, or later a video game character, in one’s own image with which to bust out of those roles…. To rewrite the tale….
But this poet, close to the end of the night – no-one had managed to hammer home the point so powerfully of what it’s meant to black men to have a president that LOOKS like them.
I think from the outside (i.e. from the perspective of a white man, or plenty of white women) it’s easy to dismiss. To say “sheesh, why do they need a BLACK Barbie, why do they need a LATINO GI Joe (go ahead and insert “why MISC COLOUR GENDER NON-CONFORMIST role”, you get the idea…). Black Santa? It is what it is, it doesn’t MEAN anything! Just not comprehending the message that’s transmitted every day of everyone’s Life of who it is we’re supposed to be. The massive underlying gestalt ORDER OF LIFE presented to us by our environment.
It was sad that the poet seemed to really view it all in the past tense. 8 gleaming years gone and erased – as if we were never going to have a white male president again. But it was clear that the memory, the legacy, the effect could never be erased. From this point on there will never NOT have been a black president. Obama has changed the bar forever. For as inevitable as it was, the day came to pass and I’m glad I got to see it, be part of it – and to very intimately be part of the farewell party tonight…
The nasty, whipsawing whitelash that has seen the ascendency of Trump offends me to the core. But I heartily believe that we’re on the right side of history, and that even though it may be two steps forward, one step back – it’s still forward motion.
Tomorrow, we’ll be back to the status quo of a white man in the White House – but a black president? We NEVER get to say “never” again.
