this is a reference to a
hollywood movie from the 60's regarding how open minded self identified liberals really feel, when they are faced with their white daughter wanting to marry a black man. it's also the title of an opinion piece published 2 days ago in the new york times by frank rich. it's already afternoon on
nov 4
th in
india, but back in the US people are just waking up on the East Coast and still well asleep on the West Coast. The polls open in about an hour or so, and then history will continue to be made, no matter who is declared president by the end of the end of the day (hopefully!).
so what makes me sit down in front of the computer right now, when i "should" be packing (yes, i know), and write something? feelings! pure emotions! after reading the said article, which
i've copied and pasted below with the original link in case anyone is interested, i watched a 13 minute video also on the new york times home page reviewing the past 2 years of historic campaigning. and i cried. tears just fell down my cheeks and quite honestly i was
surprised at such an emotional response. you see, i haven't kept up with the ins and outs of the campaigning. not when it was between
hillary and
obama, and not now either. i admit, i had become quite averse to
american politics, largely out of
disappointment from the last two elections. but i have been insisting that i must be in
delhi and in front of a
tv today no matter what. and i even voted a month ago from the
himalayas by snail mail!
i remember being a teenager, laying on my bed with my mother one
saturday morning, and telling her i was dating a black boy and being shocked at her response. she, a
bolivian of
quechan and
aymara parents, who married a white (
greek) man, was telling me that mixing was not right, i should stick to my own kind. what was my "own kind" anyway? she, who had shown me the movie guess who's coming to dinner, and imitation of life. she, who when i asked why are some people black or browner (i had never actually seen a black person except on TV until i was 6 and we moved to the US) told me that it's just skin difference and that we are all human beings, all equal, all the same, just look different. i remember mentioning all these points to her that
saturday morning, and that i had black friends and that had never been a problem. i remember seeing how difficult it was for her to face her racism, how surprised she was to discover it probably. i said to her, it's
ok if my friend so-and-so dates a black man but not me, right? not YOUR daughter. i think she was crying a bit by then, and we both laughed at the
hypocrisy. she agreed to respect my decisions of who i wanted to be with, and i agreed to respect the fact that i lived under her roof and that seeing me with a black man made her uncomfortable (
ie: no black boyfriend would be ringing the door bell or hanging out at home with me). 4 years later i had another black boyfriend. when she was able to accept him, in essence accepting that a black man can be good enough for her daughter, she did so with all her heart, knowing she had worked through a lot of very deep rooted racism which is often masked in many of us until we are triggered personally. this beautiful woman, my mother, would choose to defend that relationship shortly there after during a group dinner when she first heard the phrase "white trash". she asked what it meant and the reply was "a white woman who dates a black man for example." my mother, loyal and fierce like a tigress defending her cubs, listed out examples of white trash per this definition which included the wives of Sidney Poitier (the star of guess who's coming to dinner) and kofi annan, and of course, her daughter...
and this brings me back to the election. i have been repeatedly surprised and amazed at how many
europeans i have spoken to, who have not lived in the US, grossly underestimate what a HUGE deal it is for a black man to even be running for president, for him to still be alive right now (has to be said, sad but true, we do have a history of
assassinations), and for him to have a good chance at winning! while slavery was abolished back in the 1860s in the US, on paper at least, separate but equal was the law of our land until 1954... just over 50 years ago. and when obama was born, there were still restrictions on who was qualified to vote - ultimately aimed at keeping blacks from voting (the voting rights act came in 1965)! so that's about 350 years of inequality. and in the 1960s,
interracial marriages were still illegal in many states.
the story that has been sold abroad and which has even been attempted to be sold to
americans in elementary school, is that the US is a "melting pot!". it's not, it's never been. it's a salad;
i'm grateful to the teacher (and i can't remember who it was) who shared with us this more honest perspective some time in high school or college. there are many ingredients, and they all get tossed around together, and some juice or flavor from the
tomato will mix in with the cucumber and so forth, but it is certainly no stew! as
obama pointed out in his historic
speech on race in
Pennsylvania, this is especially the case in barber shops and
sunday mornings. and oh how true this is!!!
and this brings me back to my mother. she is now the co-owner of a barber shop. and her partner is an
african american! and this is really unheard of in the US. her conservative overwhelmingly white older male
clientele come to the shop for a conservative hair cut and some peace and rest from the office. there is some talk about politics, economics, their kids, her kids, health, etc., or basic niceties and then silence. his clients come in to talk, to connect, to bond, to feel, to hang out, to dream, to explore. some of her clients have been disturbed by the volume or content of the conversations coming from the "other" barber chair. and after being with her for many years, they simply didn't return. and it is actually like that. while mom and
carl share the same lease, plumbing, walls, door, cash register, etc... within the shop they are still separate but equal, segragated. it's still a salad, not a stew! there was a chance to sell the shop for a good price a few months back, when the owner of another shop which was closing down due to the building's remodeling came and enquired if she would sell. she was alone at the time. said that she would have to ask her partner but that probably yes, and declared their asking price. when the guy returned to talk further, he saw
carl... and never came back.
so why was i crying during the video from the
nytimes? because it is a blessing to witness this reality. because it is truly an amazing thing, that a country which put W bush in office and kept him there for 8 years, could allow themselves to be led and represented by a black man. because, as cliche and touchy
feely as it will sound, it does inspire hope in me, it inspires hope in me for the US. not because of what kind of president he would be, although that too of course, but because
americans could actually see him for who he is, a competent leader, not just a black man, not just a nigger.
i feel like a kid on
christmas eve... excited to stay up all night, watching and listening
attentively, awaiting for the morning's big
surprise.
November 2, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
AND so: just how far have we come?
As a rough gauge last week, I watched a movie I hadn’t seen since it came out when I was a teenager in 1967. Back then “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was Hollywood’s idea of a stirring call for racial justice. The premise: A young white woman falls madly in love with a black man while visiting the University of Hawaii and brings him home to San Francisco to get her parents’ blessing. Dad, a crusading newspaper publisher, and Mom, a modern art dealer, are wealthy white liberals — Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, no less — so surely there can be no problem. Complications ensue before everyone does the right thing.
Though the film was a box-office smash and received 10 Oscar nominations, even four decades ago it was widely ridiculed as dated by liberal critics. The hero, played by the first black Hollywood superstar, Sidney Poitier, was seen as too perfect and too “white” — an impossibly handsome doctor with Johns Hopkins and Yale on his résumé and a Nobel-worthy career fighting tropical diseases in Africa for the World Health Organization. What couple would not want him as a son-in-law? “He’s so calm and sure of everything,” says his fiancée. “He doesn’t have any tensions in him.” She is confident that every single one of their biracial children will grow up to “be president of the United States and they’ll all have colorful administrations.”
What a strange movie to confront in 2008. As the world knows, Barack Obama’s own white mother and African father met at the University of Hawaii. In “Dreams From My Father,” he even imagines the awkward dinner where his mother introduced her liberal-ish parents to her intended in 1959. But what’s most startling about this archaic film is the sole element in it that proves inadvertently contemporary. Faced with a black man in the mold of the Poitier character — one who appears “so calm” and without “tensions” — white liberals can make utter fools of themselves. When Joe Biden spoke of Obama being “clean” and “articulate,” he might have been recycling Spencer Tracy’s lines of 41 years ago.
Biden’s gaffe, though particularly naked, prefigured a larger pattern in the extraordinary election campaign that has brought an African-American to the brink of the presidency. Our political and news media establishments — fixated for months on tracking down every unreconstructed bigot in blue-collar America — have their own conspicuous racial myopia, with its own set of stereotypes and clichés. They consistently underestimated Obama’s candidacy because they often saw him as a stand-in for the two-dimensional character Poitier had to shoulder in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” It’s why so many got this election wrong so often.
There were countless ruminations, in print and on television, asking the same two rhetorical questions: “Is He Black Enough?” and “Is He Tough Enough?” The implied answer to both was usually, “No.” The brown-skinned child of biracial parents wasn’t really “black” and wouldn’t appeal to black voters who were overwhelmingly loyal to the wife of America’s first “black” president. And as a former constitutional law professor, Obama was undoubtedly too lofty an intellectual to be a political street fighter, too much of a wuss to land a punch in a debate, too ethereal to connect to “real” Americans. He was Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis or Bill Bradley in dark face — no populist pugilist like John Edwards.
The list of mistaken prognostications that grew from these flawed premises is long. As primary season began, we were repeatedly told that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the most battle-tested and disciplined, with an invincible organization and an unbeatable donors’ network. Poor Obama had to settle for the ineffectual passion of the starry-eyed, Internet-fixated college kids who failed to elect Howard Dean in 2004. When Clinton lost in Iowa, no matter; Obama could never breach the “firewalls” that would wrap up her nomination by Super Tuesday. Neither the Clinton campaign nor the many who bought its spin noticed the take-no-prisoners political insurgency that Obama had built throughout the caucus states and that serves him to this day.
Once Obama wrested the nomination from Clinton by surpassing her in organization, cash and black votes, he was still often seen as too wimpy to take on the Republicans. This prognosis was codified by Karl Rove, whose punditry for The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek has been second only to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as a reliable source of laughs this year. Rove called Obama “lazy,” and over the summer he predicted that his fund-raising had peaked in February and that he’d have a “serious problem” winning over Hispanics. Well, Obama was lazy like a fox, and is leading John McCain among Hispanics by 2 to 1. Obama has also pulled ahead among white women despite the widespread predictions that he’d never bring furious Hillary supporters into the fold.
But certainly the single most revelatory moment of the campaign — about the political establishment, not Obama — arrived in June when he reversed his position on taking public financing. This was a huge flip-flop (if no bigger than McCain’s on the Bush tax cuts). But the reaction was priceless. Suddenly the political world discovered that far from being some exotic hothouse flower, Obama was a pol from Chicago. Up until then it rarely occurred to anyone that he had to be a ruthless competitor, not merely a sweet-talking orator, to reach the top of a political machine even rougher than the Clinton machine he had brought down. Whether that makes him more black or more white remains unresolved.
Early in the campaign, the black commentator Tavis Smiley took a lot of heat when he questioned all the rhetoric, much of it from white liberals, about Obama being “post-racial.” Smiley pointed out that there is “no such thing in America as race transcendence.” He is right of course. America can no sooner disown its racial legacy, starting with the original sin of slavery, than it can disown its flag; it’s built into our DNA. Obama acknowledged as much in his landmark speech on race in Philadelphia in March.
Yet much has changed for the better since the era of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” thanks to the epic battles of the civil-rights movement that have made the Obama phenomenon possible. As Mark Harris reminds us in his recent book about late 1960s Hollywood, “Pictures at a Revolution,” it was not until the year of the movie’s release that the Warren Court handed down the Loving decision overturning laws that forbade interracial marriage in 16 states; in the film’s final cut there’s still an outdated line referring to the possibility that the young couple’s nuptials could be illegal (as Obama’s parents’ marriage would have been in, say, Virginia). In that same year of 1967, L.B.J.’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, offered his resignation when his daughter, a Stanford student, announced her engagement to a black Georgetown grad working at NASA. (Johnson didn’t accept it.)
Obama’s message and genealogy alike embody what has changed in the decades since. When he speaks of red and blue America being seamlessly woven into the United States of America, it is always shorthand for the reconciliation of black and white and brown and yellow America as well. Demographically, that’s where America is heading in the new century, and that will be its destiny no matter who wins the election this year.
Still, the country isn’t there yet, and should Obama be elected, America will not be cleansed of its racial history or conflicts. It will still have a virtually all-white party as one of its two most powerful political organizations. There will still be white liberals who look at Obama and can’t quite figure out what to make of his complex mixture of idealism and hard-knuckled political cunning, of his twin identities of international sojourner and conventional middle-class overachiever.
After some 20 months, we’re all still getting used to Obama and still, for that matter, trying to read his sometimes ambiguous takes on both economic and foreign affairs. What we have learned definitively about him so far — and what may most account for his victory, should he achieve it — is that he had both the brains and the muscle to outsmart, outmaneuver and outlast some of the smartest people in the country, starting with the Clintons. We know that he ran a brilliant campaign that remained sane and kept to its initial plan even when his Republican opponent and his own allies were panicking all around him. We know that that plan was based on the premise that Americans actually are sick of the divisive wedge issues that have defined the past couple of decades, of which race is the most divisive of all.
Obama doesn’t transcend race. He isn’t post-race. He is the latest chapter in the ever-unfurling American racial saga. It is an astonishing chapter. For most Americans, it seems as if Obama first came to dinner only yesterday. Should he win the White House on Tuesday, many will cheer and more than a few will cry as history moves inexorably forward.
But we are a people as practical as we are dreamy. We’ll soon remember that the country is in a deep ditch, and that we turned to the black guy not only because we hoped he would lift us up but because he looked like the strongest leader to dig us out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/opinion/02rich.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&em
m until 1975, and has long been considered one of the last Himalayan Shangri Las. Mountain valleys which plunge from spiky Himalayan peaks are lushly forested with pine and rhododendron trees. Near the Sikkim-Nepal border, and visible from Gangtok and many other towns and points around the state, is Khangchendzonga (8598m), the world’s third highest mountain.
, and most Indian standards really, and unfortunately it also has the highest alcoholism rate in the country. As we were entering Gangtok we noticed a large building complex brightly and boldly marked as a rehabilitation centre. And when we went out walking the first day we could not get over how many liquor stores we passed, at least one for every block it seemed. And that was only outdone by the name brand stores we saw: Puma, United Colours of Benetton, Tommy Hilfiger, Addidas, etc. Granted, being this close to China, some of the defected items or imitations must make it to these shelves, maybe, but still, these are authentic stores from these labels! Hell, Delhi got its first Puma store just a couple of years ago. We walked along Mahatma Gandhi Marg, which 2 years ago was converted into a pedestrian only walk way and is wider then most roads in Delhi (I exaggerate but it was obviously a double lane two way road before). There are benches and flower pots that run along the middle and stores, restaurants, etc… along the sides. It’s soooo lovely!!!
or 3 years ago. There was a booth at MG Marg, with a wall to sign, red ribbons being given out, informational pamphlets for distribution, and the schedule of events for Dec. 1st including a walk through town finishing with a rock concert! (Rock is big in the Northeast) Young men and women were all over it and as we walked along we crossed paths with many proudly wearing their red ribbons. When we got back to our hotel for a snack, the manager showed me his two red ribbons and bunch of pamphlets. I was very impressed!
aby after being born because my body temperature was too low and I really don’t think it ever adjusted fully. On the other hand, I guess this is good practice for our time in Nepal, next week (what was I thinking when I agreed to that?). When we left Gangtok and headed 4 hours West to stay at Pelling for a few days, we started to wear our gloves even during the day! And Nisarga wore his hat at all times… to sleep, to go to the bathroom, throughout the day! I even bought a hat with fleece lining. Did I mention BBRRRRRR? Yes! BBBBRRRRRR. Our noses were permanently red and frozen.
went through almost 2 days of fasting, but two days later he was up for a couple of hours vomiting and shitting everything out. During our three days in Pelling I stuck to one meal per day consisting of chicken noodle soup and cheese momos (dumplings), and after his long night in the bathroom Nisarga stuck to porridge, butter toast and bananas.
