To Shelby Steele, about Obama

Where have you gone, Martin Luther King
(not to mention the '60s and my life)?

REED STEVENS

Dear Shelby Steele,

I surprised myself by voting for Obama (California absentee ballot) last week. His candidacy felt like such a relief from being a racist pig. Damn, I’m 66 and I’m ready to put that burden down. After hearing your Bill Moyers’s PBS interview I wondered if I was drinking too much Obama Kool-Aid. So I read your book, A Bound Man: Why Obama Can’t Win, last night, chuckling at your wit and insight. What fun!

You don’t think Obama has a real base to win, black or white, but maybe we are beyond the skin stuff. And.perhaps you overlook two more important effects. First, delayed anger at the Clintons for Bill’s enormous failure, which led to Iraq, among other disasters.

Second, Hillary’s “I am a servant” appeal. Feeble! Lead us to the moral high ground. I suppose Hillary’ dull appeal could be blamed on the feeble press, which irritates me even more since I was an earnest free-lance journalist back in the day. We old believers turn and turn.

The Sunday before Martin Luther King Day, my ten-year old grandson called me from D.C. to ask what I knew about MLK for a school project. Even his 37-year-old mother, whose brown second husband, damn, I’m so tired of this separation—a charming guy who seems confused about whether to confront or bargain, the Steele description of white-black relations, will we ever get things straightened out? could not tell this ten-year-old (she divorced my son before marrying the confused guy) couldn’t say much about King who died so long ago. What’s this holiday about? What’s Black History Month, anyway?

In the midst of reading your book, what did I tell the grandkid? First, old ’60s enthusiasm flowed. I was more a bomb-banner and a feminist, but you know how these issues bled together. King was a great speaker, I said, feeling the goose bumps again. You ever hear a good Baptist preacher, I asked? Of course not: Kid goes to a parish school, single Irish Catholic mother with no time for black issues. Just marrying one and having a darling daughter with him.

I thought, at least I can take him up to Glide Memorial Church in the San Francisco tenderloin when he visits. Give him a dose of righteousness! That’s what he needs to hear, I thought.: Preacher Man, gospel choir, jazz band. Good for his education. Then I thought, Stevens, you’re really reaching. What does this old stuff matter to him, today and in the future?

Next, I realized I’m history, dead as a dodo because I, a privileged white woman, had to explain in 30 seconds over the phone the whole civil rights movement. I’ve never been to the Deep South. And yet. Well, somebody has to tell him. Then I asked, why? Have I put racist eyes in his head? The kid knows his beloved “Dad” is not his biological father but I don’t think he’s noticed how black that Macon, Georgia, family looks to my generation. May he never.

Ah, today’s grannyhood.

I completely agree with you, Dr. Steele, that welfare as we know it just feeds the tiger in the zoo. But what else can we do? I lived in downtown Philly for ten years and I stepped over the dispossessed as they slept on the steam vents. At the same time I feared a hatchet in my head on the Number 11 bus route. Goosebumps and tears.

Bleeding still,
Yours truly,
Reed Stevens