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Exhortations: Inaugural Column
Dr. Maceo Dailey````````Black Diaspora/History/Culture
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Exhortations
In this, my inaugural column, I begin with the fact that Black barbershops and beauty shops, churches and community centers, and street corners are abuzz in El Paso and elsewhere with political discussions our ancestors struggled hard to make reality, but in their wildest dreams thought would take a much longer time coming.
The gospel—good news—is that a Black man, standing tall and in rarefied company, is a viable candidate for a presidential nomination. Senator Barack Obama is intelligent, poised, and charismatic. That he is the right person for the nation at this particular time is evident to me. That he is climbing the rough side of the mountain is equally evident to me. His message is a clear and resounding one: change and fair play.
A democracy must, by its very nature, always be pulsating between change and continuity, and its citizens must know when one trumps the other. Fair play must also be our credo. This does not make us weak or wimpering, but resolute in the righteousness of our cause and in the restoration of our dignity to meet our high sense of honor and purpose: our belief that America must reach for its rightful place and continue to strive to become the beacon of hope and opportunity. We, after all, are a composite of the world’s people—this is no small democratic feat and honor.
I muse upon the words of one of the greatest American thinkers, the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, and hold them up as a reminder of what true democracy means: “Readers of dead words who would live deeds, this is the flowering of my logic: I dream of a world of infinite and invaluable variety; not in the laws of gravity or atomic weights, but in human variety in height and weight, color and skin, hair and nose and lip. But more especially and far above and beyond this, in a realm of true freedom: in thought and realm, fantasy and imagination; in gift, aptitude, and genius—all possible manner of difference, topped with freedom of the soul to do and be, and freedom of thought to give to a world and build into it, all wealth of inborn individuality. There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty.”
In future columns, I shall move back and forth from the general to the specific, extrapolating upon the last sentence of Du Bois, but with an updated discussion of differences and directions. I may be right or I may be wrong in drawing the reader’s attention to issues. I may be even redundant with “dead words”! I shall strive to be honest and frank, however, and, most importantly, drawing once again on the profound words of Du Bois: “I will face the hard fact that in this, my fatherland, I must expect insult and discrimination from persons who call themselves philanthropists and Christian gentlemen. I do not wish to meet this despicable attitude by blows; sometimes I cannot even protest with words; but may God forget me and mine if in time or eternity I ever weakly admit to myself or to the world that wrong is not wrong, that insult is not insult, or that color discrimination is anything but an inhuman and damnable shame.”
Maceo Crenshaw Dailey, Jr., Ph. D.
Director, African American Studies Program
Professor Maceo Crenshaw Dailey, Jr. , Ph.D.
Director of African American Studies, UTEP
Associate Professor, Department of History
