Black Christians like to say ‘tears are a language that God understands’. When I saw Jesse Jackson cry it seemed to me that those tears were being shed as he felt the weight of history on his shoulders. The expression, ‘tears are a language that God understands,’ is borne out of that experience of slavery and colonialism and hardship and racism and, in the case of America, the hundreds of years of trying to make it over there for black people. Not only that, but the feeling, in 2008, that the highest office in America was still out of reach for black people after all the sacrifice, all the suffering, and indeed all the victories. That weight of history was summed up so eloquently in those tears. It has been a long journey, a very long journey, and it was great to see the fulfilment of that journey in this one act of electing a black president.
A lot of people doubted Obama’s election would happen because America was not ready for a black president. There is a sense in which America will never be ready. Nowhere and no one is ever ready for something new or unprecedented. How do you get ready for it?! Will a white church ever be ready for a black vicar? It will be ready the day it gets one! There are things you can do in terms of preparing for something new but the fact is that most of us do not know how we will behave when something that has never happened before happens. There is a sense in which you never can be ready for it. Barack Obama titled his book ‘The audacity of hope’. What audacity to think that as a black man in an America that is so highly racialised you could aspire - credibly - for the highest office? But Obama mustered enough self-belief to do that and that is audacity indeed!
There are some who have said it could never happen here in this country. If it were up to them Obama would have never won the election in America! I do not accept that we have the right to stand and say things like “this can never happen here”. The problem with that kind of thinking is two-fold. Firstly, it sows the seed in the minds of those who aspire for the top that you can only go so far and so you only go half-heartedly. And, secondly, it feeds those who are determined to stop people of colour from getting into certain positions. You embolden both of them to ensure that it never happens. The genius of Obama is that he lived with black people saying he couldn’t get to the top and with white people saying ‘not on your nelly!’ and yet somehow managed to cut a path through the pack and get there.
