Last Reflection on the Meaning of the Inauguration

In the early Fall of last year I went down to the U.S. to assist with a meeting of one hundred key leaders of an ageing northeastern industrial city. The purpose of the meeting was to create a shared vision for the city for the next five years. Attending were the city’s institutional elites—the mayor and congressman, the Presidents of the local university and colleges, the CEO of the largest companies in the region, etc—along with an equal number of leaders from grassroots organizations, neighbourhood associations and place-based agencies. It was a diverse and eclectic group representing the diversity of the city; many of the folks there had never been in the same room with each other and likely never would have, had it not been for this meeting.

It didn’t take long—in fact, it was in the first small group I was with—for some of the city’s more painful history to emerge: times when public housing was razed for “city improvements” and the poor did not have a voice. I learned that the city had a history of racism, and that a surprising number of its black citizens had, in recent years, migrated south—to Atlanta—because there was more opportunity there and less racism. By the second day it was obvious that the underlying tension in the room was “for whom was this vision being created.”

The lack of trust in the room seemed to split down racial lines. It was not a rift over intention. Everybody knew that each person was there for the same intention—to make the city a better place to live. But within that intention, there were different understandings of what better meant, and what better would look like for different segments of the city. For lack of a more articulate way to put it, there was a sense by the black folks that the white folks just didn’t get it.

At the time, what struck me was how race was the wound in America that just will not close. It was the subtext of much of that meeting; the skepticism being carried by some of the black participants was palpable and not easily understood by others who had no point of reference for understanding its origins. There were some poignant moments, as when the white CEO of the city’s largest technology company, an older gentleman near retirement, reached out to a much younger black man and said “I need you to educate me.” You could feel the yearning to connect across the divide of history and pain.

It strikes me that this reality is the real backdrop of Obama’s inauguration. Block out the Capital that was behind Obama as he took the oath and focus, instead, on all the ghosts gathered, ghosts of lynchings and marches and white-only restaurants. The Inauguration was a healing ceremony, plain and simple; it was a “laying on of hands” on the body politic of the nation; its effect was to close the wound of race that began to bleed when the first slave ship came over from Africa. Other stitches had been sewn to help close the wound—the Emancipation Proclamation, Booker T. Washington, Marian Anderson and Jackie Robinson and the Voting Rights Act and Colin Powell—but this was of an entirely different order. The nation, including States that had stood proud for the Confederacy, had voted in a black man to lead them. I believe the wound closed completely that day; yes, scar tissue surely remains, but perhaps, in time, we will discover that too has healed.