Dear Friend and Reader:
Before we begin, let’s take a few moments to watch this exchange between Rachel Maddow and Pat Buchanan. It comes on right after President Obama’s speech at the NAACP, which is a perfect prelude.
Watching the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor as Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, these lastВ fourВ days have been an exercise in keeping the lidВ on aВ giddiness andВ rage so perfectly blended that the feelings could almost be bottled up and sold as an emulsion. As a woman of color, IВ watched another one rise up to the highest court of the land because she worked hard and deserved it. This was and is the original intent of Affirmative Action, and an original ideal of the founding of this republic — however imperfectly executed.В
Affirmative Action is at the heart of theВ confirmationВ proceedings that took place this last week in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the exchange of fire between Maddow and Buchanan. I cannot help but think of myself and the millions of other young men, women, boys and girls who walked through the gates of affirmative action in a land that, as Mr. BuchananВ says, “white men built”, and succeeded.
Now Mr. Buchanan is right, in a way.В We do live in a world thatВ through rich white men’s largesse we have been allowed to breathe. ThatВ they canВ let you in and can kick you out inВ a wink and a slap on your cute brown ass.В That has been the way of things since this country began. But Buchanan believes the surface of what we’ve been told about our countryВ and accepts the cartoon of our history,В notВ our history’sВ reality. The real people who built this country are invisible to people like Buchanan. By and large we’ve existed, survived and flourished under, around and in spite of this. And by the “we”, I mean men and women, poor, and from all over the planet. From kidnapped Africans in the 17th century,В impoverished, oppressed Europeans near the end of the 19th century, Asians, Central and Latin Americans in the 20th.