Chris Jepson: My gawd, a black president

Epiphanies are when that proverbial light bulb goes off in your brain. I’ve had a few in my life. The birth of my first child was an epiphany. My father going eyeball-to-eyeball with me over my foolish adolescent run-ins with the law, his succinctly asking, “When are you going to learn?” definitely produced an abrupt and necessary revelation (adjustment) on my part.

I recently had such an epiphany when I saw a photograph of President Obama standing with Asian leadership on the president’s recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation trip. There was an image of President Obama in a purple silk shirt (Asian garb) shaking hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping. And it all immediately crystalized for me, how utterly shocking it must be for old white America that a black man represents the United States to the world.

It is traumatizing; change is. All their lives, all our white history, it’s been a white man at the helm. Sure, we pay lip service to equality and pluralism, as long as it’s “us” running the show.

Interesting to me, but I think — all things considered — it’s far easier to elect a black man president of the United States than a Jew. Or, an “out” atheist for that matter. But that is grist for another column.

But the image of our black president is so at odds with what many white Americans inherently, fundamentally believe is the United States. Founded by white Europeans with wave after wave of “noble” white immigrants replenishing the white roots of the nation.

Native Americans have historically resisted assimilation (the ones actually surviving extermination) and it’s only been in the last 50 years that Hispanic population numbers have become troubling to white Americans. According to David G. Gutiérrez, America’s Hispanic population has expanded “from a small, regionally concentrated population of fewer than 6 million in 1960 (just 3.24 percent of the U.S. population at the time), to a now widely dispersed population of well more than 50 million (or 16 percent of the nation's population).” The growth of this “sort” of immigrant population distresses old white America to no end.

But, but, but a black man presiding over white America, well, that’s a mighty tough image to swallow. Not only “ruling” America but also representing white America to the entire world! Oh, how the mighty white have fallen.

Black America is so historically woven into the fabric of the nation, that we as a people could be described as cut from the same cloth. That may be extremely challenging for white America to accept but our nation’s history of slavery, Jim Crow and racism is integral to what, to who we are. Unequivocally, a sizeable percentage of our nation’s early wealth was achieved off the labor of our black citizenry. It must be clearly acknowledged (and joyously applauded) that America would not be nearly, not nearly the rich experience it is but for the many intellectual, artistic, and entrepreneurial contributions of black America.

My white father was not a racist per se, but in 1976 he told me he got the black outrage of the 1960s wrong. All “they” wanted, he said, was what any of any of us (whites) want. Justice. Opportunity. And freedom. My father was smarter than the average white boy, but if he were alive today he’d no doubt privately wonder, “Unbelievable, a black man as president.”

An epiphany: we’re but one generation from it not mattering so much.