Race and Politics 40 Years After RFK

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http://washingtonindependent.com/view/race-and-politics-40

Race and Politics 40 Years After RFK
Obama's Campaign Again Brings Race Into the Public Debate
Sen. Barack Obama (D-NY) and Robert F. Kennedy (Flickr, Library of Congress)


By Edgar Cahn 06/05/2008

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In ways that recall Kennedy's ability to reframe issues, Obama has consistently appealed to our better selves as citizens. RFK did not hesitate to remind us that poverty and race are intertwined, characterizing indifference and apathy to racism as "violence that afflicts the poor." Similarly, Obama keeps reminding us that race in the United States has the potential to draw forth our best impulses -- if the issue is framed in terms of ending violence against our own values as a nation.

The challenges the nation faces are many and distressingly familiar. Many of our schools are not doing a good job of educating our kids. Our health care system is not working for vast numbers. Time and again, race has been used to compartmentalize problems that are ours -- all of ours -- as a nation, as one nation. We let race divert us from problems that diminish our nation's greatness.

An undercurrent of racial divisiveness has long permeated U.S. politics. Obama's candidacy brings race into the open. He has exhorted Americans to confront the nation's racial and racist past. He has done so with a largeness of spirit, so that we might address our current problems, and, as he has said, give new meaning to the words, a more perfect union.

Last night I remembered an incident involving race that Robert Kennedy resolved by appealing to the best in others. My wife and I had chosen a house in one of Washington's leafy neighborhoods, but quickly discovered we were not welcome. Pulling up with the moving van, we found the quiet street blockaded by parked cars. Then, to our surprise, before a confrontation could even begin, the cars started to clear.

Later, we learned that Kennedy had secured all our neighbors' phone numbers. That morning, on the pretext that I didn't yet have a phone, he called our prospective neighbors with urgent messages to be passed on to me about the Cuban missile crisis. His actions averted what could have been a racially explosive confrontation. But he had appealed to our new neighbors’ higher impulses as citizens, as Americans.

All of this came back to me Tuesday night, as pundits analyzed Obama’s historic announcement that he had clinched the Democratic Party’s nomination. I wondered if race and gender had finally begun to lose the power to divide, to disenfranchise and divert Americans from addressing otherwise intolerable inequities.

I thought about those phone calls Kennedy made to my neighbors. I found myself asking: Are we wise enough, this time, to seize the moment?



Edgar Cahn is the founder of TimeBanks USA, a nonprofit that promotes Time Dollars, local currency for community building and a Distinguished Professor at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law. He is the author of "No More Throw-Away People" and "Priceless Money."