"Realistically, What Does the Inauguration of the First African American President Say About Race In America?," a Commentary by Diana L. Eck

Author: Diana L. Eck

Source: Politico

http://www.politico.com/arena/perm/Diana_Eck_182CCBA3-4CBC-4D5A-9866-D5577C2D4D3A.html

Yes, African-American, but we all know it is more complex than that. James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son delivers some penetrating reflections on the relation between America's moral vision and its racial experience. Writing from Paris in the 1950s, he notes America's propensity "to paint moral issues in glaring black and white." He contends that this moral simplicity of thought is rooted in "the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged." Any such view, of course, is "dangerously inaccurate," for the real world does not fall into black and white pieces. This way of thinking, he says, "protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality.

Moral high-mindedness, cast in black-and-white, and completely out of touch with the complex realities of the world: this offers us food for thought as we consider some of the dilemmas of both race and religion in America today on MLK's birthday - a world in which a bi-racial man, Barack Obama, is to be our president.