Betty Winston Bayé: [POTUS Barack] Obama's Cool Style Is Drawn From A Hard History.
Betty Winston Bayé | Obama's cool style is drawn from a hard history
Ann Nixon Cooper, of Atlanta, took up residence in a new home recently. The Tennessee native was 107 years old. The world outside of Atlanta might never have heard of Cooper were it not for then-President-elect Barack Obama's reference to her during his Election Night victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park. At 106, Cooper stood in line to cast her ballot for him. “She was born just a generation past slavery,” the President-elect said then, and now this week, on the occasion of Cooper's death, the POTUS issued a statement from the White House that praised her extraordinary life, a life during which, he said, she “saw both the brightest lights of our nation's history and some of its darkest hours. … It was a life that captured the spirit of community and change and progress that is at the heart of the American experience.”
But an American needn't be 100-plus years old to appreciate the historic nature of Obama's election. It's hard for me to believe that it was almost a year ago that I stood freezing, alongside my cousin Caroline and a gazillion strangers on the National Mall, just to be an eyewitness to a presidential swearing in that I never imagined in my youth.
I'm thinking as well about that pregnant moment in church a few Sundays ago when my friend Juanita, now in her late 70s, who has known me since I was a teenager working a summer job for the United Presbyterian Board of National Missions in New York, shared with me her consternation over what she believes are unwarranted attacks on the President by certain African-American politicians and journalists.
“Don't they understand?” Juanita asked. I knew exactly what she meant. And I realized that whenever President Obama feels as if he's been abandoned because of the tough decisions he's decided to make, he's likely to find that his most loyal supporters are people who embrace patience as a virtue. That particularly includes African Americans of a certain age whose definition of patience is not fear, or the unwillingness to act, but the quiet determination not to waste their best shots by acting or reacting foolishly under fire. My mother used to put it like this: “Betty, when you've got your hand in the lion's mouth, you've got to ease it out.”
Obama's whole person is in the lion's mouth; in fact, he's operating in a den of lions just waiting to rip him apart politically limb by limb. Yet, he persists in evidencing a personal style of patience — some call it aloofness — that frustrates a lot of people.
However, I've said before and I still believe it to be true, that although Americans long have tolerated angry presidents (LBJ, for example, was famous for cussing people out, and Richard Nixon did a fair amount of cussing. too), they aren't likely to tolerate for very long a demonstrably angry black man in the White House. History won't allow it.
Recall when South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, during Obama's speech on health care reform to a joint session of Congress, broke with decades of tradition in the body and shouted at the President, “You lie!” His Coolness just folded his hands, offered a withering stare and pressed on with his speech. Many in the joint session moaned audibly and later called for Wilson's censure. But not the President.
What I'm getting at is that it's unreasonable for Obama's critics or his supporters to expect this man to stop being who and what he is that has gotten him this far.
So yes, Juanita, I understand. But I promise you that Barack Obama is going to be just fine. He's comparable to one of those blow-up figures with the sand in the bottom. You can punch those things as hard as you can, but they'll pop right back up and mock you — and leave you frustrated and wasted, with sore knuckles for added good measure.
I understand all the Ann Coopers and all of the Juanitas who must have seemed to the world to be punching bags, always getting knocked down, but always managing somehow to get back up and be dignified in public.
In fact, I realize that without patience under fire, they could not have survived the vicissitudes of life as it was when they were young — in order to give birth to new generations that would, of course, know suffering, but not to the degree of those who came before.
Betty Winston Bayé's column appears Thursdays in the Community Forum and online at www.courier-journal.com/opinion. Her e-mail address is bbaye@courier-journal.com.
Ann Nixon Cooper, of Atlanta, took up residence in a new home recently. The Tennessee native was 107 years old. The world outside of Atlanta might never have heard of Cooper were it not for then-President-elect Barack Obama's reference to her during his Election Night victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park. At 106, Cooper stood in line to cast her ballot for him. “She was born just a generation past slavery,” the President-elect said then, and now this week, on the occasion of Cooper's death, the POTUS issued a statement from the White House that praised her extraordinary life, a life during which, he said, she “saw both the brightest lights of our nation's history and some of its darkest hours. … It was a life that captured the spirit of community and change and progress that is at the heart of the American experience.”
But an American needn't be 100-plus years old to appreciate the historic nature of Obama's election. It's hard for me to believe that it was almost a year ago that I stood freezing, alongside my cousin Caroline and a gazillion strangers on the National Mall, just to be an eyewitness to a presidential swearing in that I never imagined in my youth.
I'm thinking as well about that pregnant moment in church a few Sundays ago when my friend Juanita, now in her late 70s, who has known me since I was a teenager working a summer job for the United Presbyterian Board of National Missions in New York, shared with me her consternation over what she believes are unwarranted attacks on the President by certain African-American politicians and journalists.
“Don't they understand?” Juanita asked. I knew exactly what she meant. And I realized that whenever President Obama feels as if he's been abandoned because of the tough decisions he's decided to make, he's likely to find that his most loyal supporters are people who embrace patience as a virtue. That particularly includes African Americans of a certain age whose definition of patience is not fear, or the unwillingness to act, but the quiet determination not to waste their best shots by acting or reacting foolishly under fire. My mother used to put it like this: “Betty, when you've got your hand in the lion's mouth, you've got to ease it out.”
Obama's whole person is in the lion's mouth; in fact, he's operating in a den of lions just waiting to rip him apart politically limb by limb. Yet, he persists in evidencing a personal style of patience — some call it aloofness — that frustrates a lot of people.
However, I've said before and I still believe it to be true, that although Americans long have tolerated angry presidents (LBJ, for example, was famous for cussing people out, and Richard Nixon did a fair amount of cussing. too), they aren't likely to tolerate for very long a demonstrably angry black man in the White House. History won't allow it.
Recall when South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, during Obama's speech on health care reform to a joint session of Congress, broke with decades of tradition in the body and shouted at the President, “You lie!” His Coolness just folded his hands, offered a withering stare and pressed on with his speech. Many in the joint session moaned audibly and later called for Wilson's censure. But not the President.
What I'm getting at is that it's unreasonable for Obama's critics or his supporters to expect this man to stop being who and what he is that has gotten him this far.
So yes, Juanita, I understand. But I promise you that Barack Obama is going to be just fine. He's comparable to one of those blow-up figures with the sand in the bottom. You can punch those things as hard as you can, but they'll pop right back up and mock you — and leave you frustrated and wasted, with sore knuckles for added good measure.
I understand all the Ann Coopers and all of the Juanitas who must have seemed to the world to be punching bags, always getting knocked down, but always managing somehow to get back up and be dignified in public.
In fact, I realize that without patience under fire, they could not have survived the vicissitudes of life as it was when they were young — in order to give birth to new generations that would, of course, know suffering, but not to the degree of those who came before.
Betty Winston Bayé's column appears Thursdays in the Community Forum and online at www.courier-journal.com/opinion. Her e-mail address is bbaye@courier-journal.com.
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