Viable Politicians

After I sent my son Joel a piece on American politics, I got this in response.

"You know, I never thought about the possibility – or impossibility - of having a Black president in my life time. It always seemed like an abstract idea like going to the moon or interplanetary travel...it may happen eventually, but I'm not holding my breath. I've not watched any speeches or debates, but I'm gonna pay attention..."

The irony of your disbelief is the misinformation that commentators have put out as basic fact. I'm sure that they believe that the the two previous African American male candidates who participated in the primary process were viable only because of their activities in the American Civil Rights Movement. Jesse Jackson participated early on as a young preacher who worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. He organized People United to Save Humanity or PUSH. Al Sharpton was an even younger minister who followed others in the civil rights movement to prominence, especially in his ministry in the New York City area and then with more national concerns for the rights of minorities and the displaced.

From 1984 and 1988, Americans were challenged to possibly vote for a Black male candidate for president as Jessie Jackson was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President. From 1991 to 1997 he served as the Shadow Senator for the District of Columbia, a non-voting representative of a district whose vote does not count, but has everything to do with the social climate in the seat of government.

Al Sharpton made a run for the same Democratic nomination in 2004. As an activist, he says, that is his "...job is to make public civil rights issues until there can be a climate for change." Rev. Shapton was born 5 months after the Supreme Court decided the Brown vs the Board of Education decision that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Yet these are the two Black men that are placed over and against the "first viable Black candidate" Barack Obama. I find it almost insulting whenever I hear any political commentator limit the viability of a candidate to 1. being a Civil Rights Leader and 2. to being a Black Male.

How easily we have dismissed the first Black Candidate for nomination to the office of President of the United States. It may not have been about viability, but credentials, and this twentieth century politician had a purse full. The Honorable Shirley Chisholm, Congresswoman from Brooklyn, was not only the first African American woman elected to Congress, where she served from 1968 to 1982, but in her run for the highest office in the United States she was able to garner 151 delegate votes from several primaries in the 1972 race for the presidency.

So you see, my son, even prior to your birth there are some of us who had a glimmer of what was possible and what might be possible, perhaps in your lifetime.

Dad