Unity V. Change
I’ve been thinking hard about Jelani Cobb’s post on the mutual exclusivity of unity and change. Money quote:
The short version is this: there are things we will have to fight about and we can have change or we can have national unity, but probably not both.
In making this argument, Jelani references one of the quotes that got Barack to where he is today, “There is not a black America or a white America, but a United States of America”, before noting that this isn’t actually true. Granted.
Jelani (don’t you love the false intimacy? I’ve never met the man and here I am calling him by his first name) puts out the premise that unity requires that no one be angered and that peace reign. That is one way to achieve unity and it is certainly the way of least resistance. It requires little to nothing of anyone and is a paradigm of stasis and maintenance.
But I don’t think that is what The Man has in mind. Up to this point in President-Elect Obama’s career I haven’t seen a lot of timidity in his approach. Quite the opposite, in fact. To me, the speech in Philadelphia is a case study in boldly making us think, by talking to us like we are adults.
So my hope is that Obama will take a different path to unity, the harder and more necessary path. He needs to force factions together until the surface tension breaks and a cohesive whole is constructed. Yes, there will certainly be people maddened by this and that is fine with me. Obama could personally discover a cure for sickle cell anemia and Sean Hannity would rip him a new one for ignoring cancer in white people.
Jelani is definitely right about one thing, change begins at the margins. But change isn’t accomplished until the center accepts it. That is Barack’s real mission.
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