Obama is probably the first mirror of America. The presidents we’ve had before, they’re still portraits that were painted a long time ago.
The politics of the last 40 years are over. Barack Obama’s phenomenal rise signals a country on the verge of a new majority. This American multiracial coalition is rewriting rules and scaring the hell out of the old guard. As the hip hop generation faces its most important election ever, Jeff Chang reports from the conventions of Denver and St. Paul. Our United States has reached …The Tipping Point “Tonight Freedom Rings!”
Reverend Bernice A. King, the youngest daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told the crowd on August 28, echoing her father’s epochal “I Have a Dream” speech given 45 years before. And now the flocks gathered at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High stadium would witness a giant step toward that dream’s realization in the historic nomination of Barack Obama. “This is one of the nation’s greatest defining moments,” she told the roaring audience.
The 85,000-plus people who gathered to hear Barack Obama accept his nomination as the Democratic Party’s first black presidential candidate were a rippling, multihued cloth of humanity—people of all faiths, colors, and generations in rapt anticipation, shedding tears of joy as the sun set over the snow- capped Rockies. But it was more than just a powerful, emotional gathering. It was the outline of a new American majority.
Backstage, as The Black Eyed Peas leader William “will.i.am” Adams prepared to step onstage to perform “Yes We Can” with John Legend and the Agape Choir—a song that, like the candidate it celebrated, seemed to emerge from nowhere to sound a note of idealism in a time of cynicism and strife—he was thinking about his old neighborhood.
In the projects where he was raised—the two-story Estrada Courts in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles—there’s a famous mural of Che Guevara pointing straight at you like Uncle Sam. The graffiti-style words next to Che read WE ARE NOT A MINORITY!! In Obama, Will saw a candidate who reflected his reality. “Obama is probably the first mirror of America,” he said. “The presidents we’ve had before, they’re still portraits that were painted a long time ago.”
People of color are now a majority in forerunner states like California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii. More than two in five Americans under the age of 18 are nonwhite. Census data project that the United States could become majority-minority by 2042, a full eight years earlier than previously expected.
Thanks to hip hop, American popular culture has been thoroughly, to coin a word, colorized. These are all signs that we may be in the middle of an era of expansive racial change. For some, these signs point to fear. For us, they point to hope.
Rewind back to the bitter cold of this past January, when Iowans under the age of 25 delivered Obama’s margin of victory in that first caucus, jump-starting his historic march to the Democratic nomination. In the 14 most competitive states, young people made up more than half of the 3 million new registered voters. Through the primary season, young voters turned out at almost twice the rate they did in 2000.
Young people, urbanites, progressives, and people of color have been the driving force behind Obama’s presidential run. “Barack Obama owes his nomination, in large part, to the strength of those voters,” says BET News analyst Keli Goff, author of Party Crashing: HowThe Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence (Basic, 2008), “and the strength of people underestimating those voters.”
Forty years have passed since Dr. King and Robert F. Kennedy fell to bullets. In 1968, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon and American Independent Party candidate George Wallace won 57 percent of the electorate by campaigning for the so- called “Silent Majority,” stirring a white backlash against “student radicals” and “angry negroes.” Since that time, racism and generational fear have been a dependable, winning electoral strategy.
Politicos parsed the “Silent Majority” into demographic slivers to more deeply exploit those fears, a process that continues in coded stereotypes like “hockey moms” and “hard- working Americans.” kind of politics that abandoned and contained inner-city youths. In 1992, Pat Buchanan gave the backlash a new name: “cultural war.” Right-wingers went after the hip hop genera- tion in everything from censorship to policing. Would Bill Clinton have won without his Sister Souljah moment? (Google it.)
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Comments
1.
ranquo says:
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Well, Obama is an eye opener to all those who thought that they could never make it .Now,you can be whom you wanna be if you work hardat it .Go bless OBAMA.
December 10, 2008 at 4:37 am
2.
airmanparker says:
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Just a little background info so you don't think my opinion is biased. I am a 19 year old white male who is currently overseas fighting the war on terror. I spent the last five years of my life living in Atlanta, GA. At times I was the only white kid in the only school, but that doesn't matter. I have white, black, and Mexican people in my family and I love me all. Enough said.
The other day I was riding around in my patrol car and I figured that I should get to know a little bit more about my new “boss”. I was absolutely appalled at what was written in that article. It is absolutely ridiculous. I actually thought for a split second that electing Obama as President of The United States of America would actually mean that our country was more mature than it ever was before. People finally forgiving and moving on. People finally coming together, but no I was wrong. You people at Vibe magazine are the PROBLEM, not the “man”. Black people have all the same opportunities that any white person has if not more, and you all want to act like we are oppressing you all. Grow up! “Enslave the white race,” why would you write that shit? It is the twenty first century, right? If some white person wrote about enslaving a black person or wrote half the immature things you all wrote there would be a riot. Just so you know racism will never die, because there are ignorant people at Vibe magazine that can’t move on. Honestly with all due respect to the Honorable Barrack Obama, there is no difference from a black politician and a white politician! You people need to stop seeing color. You people should be absolutely ashamed at yourselves!
November 16, 2008 at 5:20 pm
3.
olay3dezs says:
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I read the article on Barack Obama and realize the youth is very important. I was saying to myself that without the youth learning now ; it take myself and others back to the days of not caring how our country is ran. With the youths growth and future happenings to come we all are united and our knowledge is.
November 13, 2008 at 4:15 pm