O Lord, How Excellent Is Thy Name

Author's Note: I am currently a member of The Kuumba Singers, a student singing group, which was created in 1970 (1) to celebrate the creativity and spirituality of black culture, (2) as a safe space for black students on campus, and (3) to leave a space better than you found it. I hesitated to put this up, but the group is too much a part of my life not to share. I only ask that, in reading what I write about Kuumba, you remember that no group is monolithic. I do not presume to speak for anyone.

This semester, I joined The Sisters of Kuumba, the female a capella subset of The Kuumba Singers. Here we are performing "Holy, Holy, Holy." (More for audio than for video...)

One Last Election Thing...

...someone turned a camera on and asked me to talk about Barack Obama. Would you like to see?

Election Reflection

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

I woke up this morning and just lay there.

There is still so much going on inside me that I hesitate to put pen to paper.

The whole thing still feels like a dream, like something barely believable, and yet, too real to just disappear.

In my blockmates’ room... we flipped back to NBC just as the channel started working again. After days, weeks of knocking on wood, after just having told Ben and Jose to stop celebrating Ohio because we weren’t done yet, there was a strange empty moment when I could not take in the graphic flashing fireworks across the screen; another when I simply did not believe it.

Barack Obama. 44th President of the United States of America.

We screamed and carried on, of course, and started dialing our friends and family. (I actually had to remind my friend Michael to get off the phone with me and call his parents, after nearly a full minute of our confused screaming.) But as we spoke to person after person, as we watched the electoral tally climb from 280-something to 290-something to over 330, the news began to sink in, really sink in.

To tell the truth, I’m not even sure its hit me now, over 12 hours later.

Strangely enough, while I celebrated to hear civil rights leaders rejoice, while I danced along in our room to the strains of “My president is black…”, the idea of a black man as president was not the concept I had trouble wrapping my head. Perhaps because I am young and black, because I never watched Jesse Jackson’s attempt at the White House, because I know so many black men and women whom I would trust to lead this country, the words “President Barack Obama” felt natural on my tongue.

No – the part I am having trouble wrapping my head around is this.

For over two years, I put my soul into this campaign, this movement. Three months of data entry, phone-banking, and knocking on doors in Manchester, New Hampshire. Nearly a year of arguing his viability to friends and family, slowly converting skeptics a generation or two ahead of me (or cynics my age, young in years if not at heart). Two long years of working, agonizing, hoping, and believing; voting in each primary election; and begging, cajoling, demanding that each of my friends register and do the same. Two years that came down to a single night, proof of something I had long ago given up on.

What I do makes a difference.

What I do can change the world.

I sit here this morning, wrestling not with disbelief over the fact of a black president, but with the realization that I am living today in a world that I envisioned and worked towards.

A world that, though I saw it in my mind’s eye, I never believed I would actually see.

Yes, We Did!

President. Barack. Hussein. Obama.

First Impressions

Author's Note: As the 2008 Presidential Election drew to a close, I thought it might be appropriate to revisit my first impressions of my candidate, Barack Obama, from the beginning of the race.

February 13th, 2007

Senator Obama was in New Hampshire today as part of his candidacy announcement tour, and the Students for Obama group planned a trip to go volunteer. I got a spot at the last second last night, so at 2:00 today I climbed in a car with some interesting political characters and made the trek to the University of New Hampshire, where I spent an hour and a half guarding the doors until they let people in, another hour waiting and gathering Obama paraphernalia, and then an hour and a half listening to the senator's words of wisdom.

What an incredible person. There's this unbelievable ease about him, and he's got an honest, unscripted quality that I can't really describe other than to say that he reminds me of my dad... It bothered me that he was a little less than open while speaking - he almost seemed to resent the audience's clapping in the middle of his speeches, and he gave his questioners eye contact but not a smile - although he did light up when it was time to shake hands. It was almost as though he found relating to people as a group more enjoyable than relating to them on an individual basis. In any case, I hope it's something his staff catches when he's refining his pitch. And he's on the issues as far as I'm concerned, although his gay marriage / civil unions position gave me pause, as did parts of his immigration stance. Mostly I think he's good at being moderate yet dynamic, and if the America he sees comes to exist, I would be more than proud to live here.

I ended the day pretty disillusioned by some of the discussions I had - politically minded in a cynical (bordering on superficial) way. I'm so tired of hearing about and thinking about electability and the right things to do. Maybe it's just a product of being "brought up" politically on Deval Patrick's campaign, but I think there should be a little more time and thought spent on the issues and the strategies of government. Let the campaign managers think about electability - we're the ones who are supposed to elect.

In Defense of Evelyn Hammonds

Author's Note: During the summer of 2008, Professor Evelynn Hammonds assumed her new role as Dean of Harvard College. While I do not know Dean Hammonds personally, I was affected by her appointment in an unexpected way. After the appointment was announced in Spring 2008, I found myself engaged in an online discussion concerning why President Drew Gilpin Faust (incidentally, Harvard's first female president) chose to appoint Hammonds. In the course of this discussion, someone suggested that the reason might be that Hammonds is a black woman. Below are my responses, edited only for form and to protect the privacy of others involved in the debate.

Evelynn Hammonds teaches both graduate and undergraduate classes in the African and African-American Studies Department and History of Science department. She has a master's degree in physics from MIT, not to mention a Ph.D. in history of science from Harvard. Before coming to Harvard she taught at MIT, she's been a visiting professor at UCLA and Hampshire College, and she has also served as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin).

And that's only part of her biography.

Most importantly, she's currently the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Recruitment and Diversity. The decisions she makes directly affect the experience of students at the college - i.e. what kind of professors we interact with every day, and thus the quality of our academic and intellectual experience here...

There are two issues here:
1) The assumption that Professor Hammonds was chosen (either in part or entirely) because she is a black woman
2) The question of whether or not she is qualified to be the Dean of the College

To even joke, before a discussion of the issues, that her appointment was decided by placing her identity as a black women over her credentials is not only "horribly essentializing and very hurtful" but also simply wrong.

Does anyone honestly think for one moment that Harvard's administration would choose someone who was unqualified for the position of Dean of the College? I think not. They did not just look around, say "There's a black female professor," and appoint a newbie with no administrative credentials to speak of.

Her identity could not possibly have been the primary reason for her appointment or even a major reason for her appointment. The primary reason for her appointment was her position as a senior faculty member who has also served in an administrative capacity in the administration. And to argue that her race and gender "make up" for something she lacks is to imply her inferiority and her inability to get such positions without being a black woman.

I can't answer for her being more or less qualified than other candidates, but I do believe that qualifications and identity aside, administrators are chosen based on their perceived ability to carry out the job at hand. Sometimes that perception is based on a resume of experience. Sometimes that perception is based on a candidate's effectiveness in one position her or she has held. Sometimes that perception is based on working closely with the candidate in question. And sometimes that perception is based on examples of the candidate's good judgment.

We can't know why she was chosen. We can only speculate. To speculate that race and gender were among the main reasons cheapens Professor Hammonds' other personal qualities and experiences which make her suited to be Dean of the College.

An Unpleasant Experience

Author's Note: This is by no means representative of my usual encounters with security at airports or at other public transportation terminals. On the whole, I have found security personnel to be attentive and thorough while remaining courteous and humane. Needless to say, this incident shocked me as much as it hurt me.

On Saturday night, my family headed to the Denver airport to catch our almost-midnight flight back home. Now my sister just turned 18, but she doesn't have a license or permit, just a state ID. On the way to Colorado, this ID (in combination with her birth certificate) worked just fine when we went through security. I guess Denver had a different standard.

They pulled her aside to a different security station, ran her and her bags through, frisked her, and then proceeded to search her bags by hand. The whole time she sat there, detained, with a scared look on her face, and I stood next to my parents across from her with my arms crossed, glaring at any TSA agent that passed me.

None of them bothered to explain what was going on when one of the machines went off unexpectedly, and they started sterilizing all their tools. No one helped her repack her bags or gave her more than brisk orders as the process went on. And one agent, who wasn't searching her, expressed his surprise that they didn't let her through with what should have been sufficient ID, accompanied by her legal parents who had proof of their parental relationship. (A.N.: And to be absolutely clear, my sister was carrying nothing illegal or malicious - the alarm was set off during the search by some lotion, mistakenly packed in her main bag rather than the approved Ziploc.)

I'm sorry - that doesn't make me feel safe. I was furious the whole time it was happening, and I cried in the terminal after we got through. Because only days after a wonderful week that made me feel like I actually had a stake in my country, I was terrified and helpless, unable to assure that (should she be mistaken for a terrorist or detained because of skin color or any other characteristic) justice would be done for my sister, a U.S. citizen, and a scared young girl.

Democratic National Convention 2008

Author's Note: I spent the summer of 2007 working on Barack Obama's presidential campaign in New Hampshire, preparing for the primary election in January 2008. I don't think I ever let myself dream we would get as far as the convention - much less that I would be there when we did! Check out my DNC blog below.

I'm blogging about the convention from Denver this week! New posts every night at http://eilsew-t.livejournal.com/.

If You Knew You Would Not Fail...

Author's Note: I originally wrote this reflection after the Fourth of July (2008), but since my birthday falls one week earlier, I usually end up spending the holiday weekend thinking about the year that has passed and the year to come. This piece reflects how I felt about life as I marked another coming-of-age.

While out and about with the family this weekend, I encountered the following message in a cute little shop:

"What would you attempt to do if you knew you would not fail...?"

...First thing I thought when I saw this quote?

I would write.

Stories, poems, novels. All without worrying about critics, or being understood, or whether or not what I'm writing is any good, or whether I can survive on what I make by writing, or whether I will be lonely.

In fact, I think I may do that anyway...