now i can exhale

When I first read the title of terry mcmillan’s Waiting to Exhale I thought to myself, “Oh I get it – in a woman’s life there are so many pressures that she always feels as if she at the edge of the precipe, holding her breath, waiting for that opportunity to step back, to rest down her many burdens and simply – exhale. I get it.”

In truth, I never did. Really get it that is. Until Wednesday when I watched Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech.

I exhaled.

That was the true power of the speech for me. As I listened to the opening lines about the constitution and the solution to slavery and the civil rights workers I thought to myself, OK, creating the historical context of race and politics in the US – fairly predictable, though remarkably eloquent, opening to a speech that I thought was going to primarily focus on his relationship with Rev’d White. Even as he went to describe his unlikely path to the present, I thought, good though not particularly challenging way to contextualize the Obama campaign. Even when Obama went on to repudiate and condemn Rev’d Wright’s offensive statements, I thought this is a polished example of hasty damage control. It was when Barack said that for all Rev’d Wright’s imperfections, Barack was not about to repudiate the man. That’s when I started to exhale. First a slow leak, then building to a piercing hiss, then one gigantic whoosh! I never felt warm and tingly, or overcome with emotion, or incited to action, or any of those usual feelings when I hear powerful speeches.

No it was more … stunned. And breathless.

For so long, in discussions about “Race” in America, when someone would ask me what I thought my answer would always be “Yeah, but …” to questions that by their very nature precluded a discussion of the difficult truths of the issue. Now Barack has said what for so long has been unsaid.

My thoughts on Race? What he said!

Someone finally said it – for me America is a different place now. In the America before “a more perfect union” the black world and the white world were separated by a chasm of misunderstanding. Black and White America since has at least been given a glimpse of each other’s world. And with that glimpse, a hope that the chasm has narrowed.