With Obama, not a post-racial nation, but something more complex |
With Obama, not a post-racial nation, but something more complex
The Washington Post
2013-01-21
Marc Fisher, Staff Writer
The huge oil painting propped up on a bridge table at 13th and F streets NW was arresting enough to stop people even as they hurried toward the Mall. There they were, heroes of black America, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr. and Tupac Shakur, Huey Newton and Barack Obama, all on horseback in a classic Western tableau.
One after another, potential customers, almost all of them black, stepped up to inspect the painting and the $20 prints of it that were for sale Monday. Then they did a double take, because the couple selling the prints, Corey Francis and Kelly Allen, were white.
Francis pointed to the center of the painting, to a convincing likeness of the president: “That’s Will Smith, isn’t it?”
A suspicious silence fell over his black customers — was the white guy making fun or having fun? And then Francis smiled, they all cracked up, and three more Obama supporters bought a print.
On the day the nation witnessed the second swearing-in of the first black president, race mattered, as it has at every turn throughout American history. But blacks and whites along the Mall and the parade route, as well as others across the land, say it matters in different ways at the midpoint of this historic presidency…
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Tags: Marc Fisher, The Washington Post, Washington Post