The whole Joe Wilson self-outing not only joins a long line of Republicans declaring their irk at the current President. But rather than huffing and puffing about the rudeness, this time it raised in my mind an issue that is part of the history and complicated reality of being the first Black President, there are a lot of people in this country who have never had any government leader who was not White.
Particularly in those parts of the country where racial discrimination is a part of their cultural legacy, there are regions of this country, which I am sure have never actually had a leader, local or national, who was Black. That means that for many people of the Joe Wilson class, they benefit from white privilege, are part of the perpetuation of white privilege and intend to maintain that privilege for them and their progeny. Yet, despite all the determined efforts to maintain their version of "real America", the national as a whole managed to place a Black leader in office, and at the very top no less.
In my own history I grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, later moving to several small towns until ending up in the "big city" of Albuquerque. My state has few African Americans (about 2% overall) and is otherwise evenly split between Hispanics and Anglos. Yet we managed to elect ourselves a Black mayor in Las Cruces in the late 1970's, still to this day the only mayor we ever built a statue to honor.
So when I see Obama, I have a context for knowing something about what to expect. He isn't foreign or strange or without precedent in my experience. He is not suddenly launched in charge of my government despite years of my peers telling me that his race was only good for menial labor. He bears for me none of the lies, conceits, prejudices and other baggage because my neck of the woods really did traffic in that stuff. He is a leader, and I treat him as such, including the dignity his office deserves.
But when I see Joe Wilson's antics, I don't see a principled opposition. I see someone who has never had any person of color have a position of authority over him in his life and he is left seething. Joe Wilson has no context for this, and only the lies of his upper class upbringing to refer to. They are useless to him now. And so he rants like a child.
How many of you have ever had a Black person serve in a position of political authority in your life? Is Obama your first black leader? And does your experience make it easier or harder for you to take him seriously as your leader now?