Bob Edwards: The President-Elect

Sent to you via Google Reader

Bob Edwards: The President-Elect

I want to preface these remarks by assuring my listeners that if President Obama makes one false move, my producers and I will hold him to account and scrutinize him with the same fervor as we have President Bush. Yes we will!



I've obviously had days to think about this remarkable moment in American history and all the things have been said by now. As Desmond Tutu said in the Washington Post on Sunday, November 9th, no one of my generation thought he'd see the end of the Soviet Union or the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of a post-apartheid South Africa--as he ranked the Obama achievement with those milestones. I have thought this over a lot and I always believed that a black candidate of Obama's qualities would emerge--I just never thought there'd be enough white people who would vote for such a person, and now I'm very proud and pleased to know differently. Yes, I know that Obama lost the white vote--but I also know that he wouldn't have won without the significant number of whites who voted for him. As we all know, vast numbers of white voters overcame age-old prejudices---for whatever reasons--to cast their first votes for an African-American.



I grew up in segregationist Louisville, Kentucky. Jim Crow is not a page in a history book to me--I was there and I lived it. When I was a little kid, my mother would take me on the bus to go downtown to shop in department stores where black people were not be allowed to try on the clothes for sale. Those stores had four restrooms and two water fountains. I was a little kid and couldn't read the signs that told me which restrooms and which water fountains were designated "colored." When I chose the "wrong" one I'd get a whipping.



I loved my father, but I was repulsed by his bigotry. He believed black people were not fully human. They were not black people to my father--they were niggers. That was a word he passed on to me and I had to un-learn it. For this I give thanks to my five-years-older brother Joe, who told me about this fellow named Martin Luther King back in the 1950's when we were both still children. Nowadays we talk about being "on the right side of history." Brother Joe and I chose to be there at the expense of our father's love. Dad would even race-bait me. We'd be watching the Ed Sullivan Show and when a black performer came on, he'd utter some racial epithet to provoke a response from me. Once I caught on, I'd deny him a reaction. And here's the great irony: If my father had been alive last Tuesday, he'd have voted for Barack Obama because he was a yellow-dog Democrat who voted for EVERY Democrat. I am not, and have voted for Republicans and Democrats.



White people who voted for Obama are in a self-congratulatory euphoria--and I will not disturb them from that. Obama made a lot of white conve...

Ginny

I can has iPhone?