DNC: Congratulations to ForumHaiti.com for a job well done!!Your coverage of the National Democratic Convention was one of the bests amongst other Haitian forums.
Keep the good work. Michel Nau!!
Sak ta di sa ke’m ta we e viv yon moment konsa! Yon Afrikan-Amerikan vin Prezidan de Zeta-Zini!!
Obama makes historyNomination of an African-American adds some reality to King’s dreamIs this what Martin Luther King Jr. saw from the mountaintop?
Are we, on this summer day in 2008, standing at the gateway of the promised land that King, only hours before his death, told the world he had seen?
Maybe. Promised lands, after all, are not free of strife. Their only guarantee — in this life, anyway — is that effort may be justly rewarded. For centuries, African-Americans were denied that right. For decades, they have doubted even its approach.
Today, doubts are diminished. With Barack Obama’s nomination for president, black Americans can see, hear and touch flesh-and-blood proof that they have arrived at a new place — if not a promised land, then a land of promise. Henceforth, this country’s black children will be able to grow up believing they could someday be president.
Their sights have been raised.
That’s a fundamental shift that will play out in thousands of ways over years and decades. It doesn’t mean the end of racial disparity or discrimination, but it recalibrates the range of possibilities and expectations. It opens a door — much as a nomination of a strong female candidate also would have — to more change.
And while this is a historic moment for black Americans, it isn’t their success alone. This is a day that the country, itself, takes a giant step toward fulfilling its own elusive ideals.
Maybe all men really are created equal or, at least, maybe we’re getting close to believing it. That, after all, was King’s dream — not simply that a black man would be president, but that “sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” and that “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Politics aside, this is a moment for all Americans to savor. You don’t have to be black or a Democrat or even to think Obama would make a good president.
All that is necessary is to be possessed of a good heart, and to believe in the value of breathing life into our own rhetoric of equality and opportunity. Today is one in which all Americans, of all colors and political beliefs, can take pride and satisfaction.
That may make campaigning a little more difficult for John McCain, at least in the short term. It’s harder to criticize a man when his success crystallizes the hopes of so many voters. But beyond whatever words he may choose to mark this pregnant moment in history, his best service to the cause of equality will be to run a tough-minded campaign that fairly sets out the differences between his beliefs and Obama’s. This isn’t a campaign for class president.
And, of course, a real world of strife remains to be confronted. Whatever promises Obama’s nomination holds for the future, it doesn’t improve today’s black graduation rates or unemployment rates or poverty rates. It doesn’t put black families back together or change the hearts and minds of racists who still can’t absorb the fundamental flaw of their own characters. There is still work to be done.
That’s all true, but so is this: A black man has been nominated for president. That’s a fact. Other facts will change, but this one will be true forever. Sounds like a promised land.
Accueil 
