Yesterday in El Dorado, Kansas, Barack Obama told of his white lineage, and how his maternal grandparents had met and fallen in love (did people fall in love back then, or just hook up?) in Kansas. His mother was born there, later met his Kenyan father in Hawaii. They’re both dead now. According to the BBC radio coverage this morning, Obama sought out white cousins in the crowd after. One said she was praying for him.
"Bleeding Kansas" was a battleground in the fight against slavery, and then 100 years later in the fight against segregation. In 1954, just about when Obama’s mother left Kansas, the Supreme Court ruled against segregated schools in Topeka.
Which is to say that the family story Obama was celebrating yesterday would have been denounced not that long ago in Kansas as miscegenation, or even "the mongrelization of the white race." Black men were lynched for doing what he was bragging about, and the crowd was adoring. Countries change. When Ali Abunimah says that Palestine is one country and that Jews and Arabs can learn to live with one another in freedom, I think of Obama’s Kansas. People surely doubted that blacks and whites could live as equals here. Progressive America has a lot to teach the world…
