I couldn’t sort out my feelings in writing before the Florida Courier went to print last week. I cried when the presidential race was called at 11 p.m. on Election Day as I saw the Obamas and the Bidens, including Joe’s elderly mother, on stage together. I thought, “Finally, this is the real face of America – multigenerational, multicultural, multiethnic. This is what my parents and so many others fought for all their lives – the right to be recognized as a human being in which skin color is a description, not a determinant.”  Mrs. Biden lived to see it, but Daddy and so many others didn’t.

Post-traumatic stress disorder?
I know I’ve been traumatized by racism. Daddy risked his life riding the back roads of Florida as a community activist and state NAACP president. Our home was a reinforced concrete bomb shelter Daddy built to shield Mom and the family from danger. It was built when I was two, seven years after NAACP activists Harry T. and Harriette Moore were killed in a 1951 Christmas Day bomb blast in Mims, 45 miles south of Daytona. 

As kids, my siblings and I fielded threatening phone calls from cowardly White men who told us our days were numbered. A cross was burned in our front yard. Black military veterans were Daddy’s “Secret Service” detail that guarded our home and followed us as we were dropped off at school.

As the oldest son, I grew up fearful that I’d have to become the “man of the house” once Daddy was murdered, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dad’s Morehouse College schoolmate, had been murdered when I was 11.  Before I was a teenager, I was writing eulogies in my head so when Daddy was killed, I could properly speak on behalf of the family.

(Thanks be to God, who had other plans. By the time I did eulogize Daddy, who died in his own bed at age 76 four years ago this week, I was a middle-aged father of two.)

‘No you can’t’
Michelle Obama spoke eloquently about how Black parents tell their kids “No, you can’t achieve that” because they love their children too much to see them be traumatized by the racist constraints America, the modern foundation of freedom, justice and democracy, has historically imposed on Black people.

My parents never told me what I couldn’t achieve. They didn’t have to. As a kid, I saw how much White people hated or feared us and especially Daddy. It seemed there was nothing we wanted to do that White folks wouldn’t oppose. I figured success and achievement would be the best revenge, and I’ve succeeded and achieved, with unexpected help from all kinds of people in different places, more than I’ve failed.

Personal impact
Still, America’s broken my heart too many times to count. My first brush with personal racism was after a spiteful Volusia County school board shut down all-Black Campbell Elementary after my fourth grade year. (Black parents had sued to desegregate public schools.)

My parents sent me to a local Catholic school. Campbell had focused on academic excellence and had high expectations of its students. In four short years, it had prepared me to become an award-winning student-athlete when I left. In Catholic school, most of my classmates’ parents ostracized me after school, because I was smarter than little Billy and Becky and was a better athlete.

Daddy said if my White classmates wouldn’t come visit me in our home, I wasn’t going to theirs. Some Black kids who lived in nearby public housing thought we were rich ‘Oreo’ sellouts – Black on the outside, White on the inside. My brother Glenn and I battled them in football and basketball, and occasionally blood was shed. In ninth grade, I asked a White girl to go to prom. I had known her since fifth grade. She said yes, but needed to ask her parents. Her mother, my biology instructor, cussed her out and put her on punishment. At the time, I was considering becoming a doctor. Suddenly my biology straight-A’s became Cs.

Made decisions
I felt like I was caught between two worlds. I vowed to never let anyone of any race consciously treat me like “a nigger” again. I neve

r have. Education would become my equalizer. My thinking: “I’ll show them all.”

I was determined to be more educated than anyone I went to school with. I chose all-Black, all-male Morehouse over the University of Florida, then went to UF for a law degree and a Master of Business Administration to get some of the “White man’s credentials” just to prove that a young brother could do it. 

Why love America?
Why, despite its constant, sneering rejection of me and people like me over the course of 400 years, do I love America?  Because of the Constitution. Since high school, I’ve unapologetically availed myself of my right of free speech, the greatest constitutional right Americans have.

Example: I have refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance for more than 35 years. I’ll pledge allegiance to my homeland, but not a piece of multicolored cloth that represents an unrealized ideal.

(Nobody has ever challenged me on that. My amended, simplified version: “ I pledge allegiance to the United States of America, which aspires to be one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  Why no God in my pledge? Words mean something! There is no state religion. You don’t have to believe in God to be a good American. And given America’s history of violence, hypocrisy and genocide, having God in the pledge is blasphemous. America’s real God is money.)

A free Black man
I’ve worn African clothing almost exclusively since visiting the motherland in 1991, even when I was a South Florida trial lawyer. I’m a serious brother; I don’t laugh when I’m not tickled. I’m 6 feet 4 inches tall, 225 pounds.  I don’t attempt to minimize my physical presence (other than for children) to make anyone feel comfortable.  Generally, I don’t give a damn about what people think about me.

For 30 years, I’ve tried to advocate for independent thinking and self-determination in the Black community (with intermittent success) via mass media that my family owns, and I haven’t been locked up for anything I’ve written or said – to date. For that I’m thankful, because I could have done this only in America. 

Veterans’ Day is a sober reminder that even the attempt to freely exercise legal rights in an imperfect country isn’t free. It was paid for with shed blood. But I always remember that many who shed blood were denied the rights they died to protect.

No magic bullet
Over time, I found out that education is not necessarily an equalizer. (Neither is religion.) My Black male colleagues in the law earn 72 cents for every dollar their White male counterparts with the same training and experience earn – sisters make even less. There’s a lifelong American ‘Black tax’ that follows us from cradle to grave, regardless of education. It increases our chances of stillbirth, infant mortality, being disciplined in school and dropping out, unemployment, imprisonment, small business failure, poverty, sickness, and early death. (And there’s a special price to pay for being Black, male and defiant.)

It’s the hypocrisy and denial of historical racism and its continuing impact on me that sandpapers my ‘scar tissue’ daily. This ‘Christian’ country refuses to even ask Black America’s forgiveness for becoming a world power by stealing the labor of enslaved Africans for almost 400 years at the direct expense of their descendants, who never benefited from an intergenerational transfer of wealth. (President Obama could start there. Begging pardon won’t add to the budget deficit.)

There’s the constant racial disparities in income, education, health care, employment, housing, entrepreneurship, criminal justice, etc. that neither our government nor our neighbors will address.

Just one story
My story is one of millions, and it’s still being written. It’s relevant only to give you an idea of the prism through which I view an America that now seems willing, after four centuries, not to define a man primarily by his dark skin. 

So to me, this election was personal, though maybe it should not have been. Do I reevaluate my lifelong mindset – developed through personal experience, observation, and historical analysis – about being Black and male in America? Is the American ideal now closer to becoming reality than it was before November 4, 2008? What can and must I do to help my homeland become the “more perfect union” it professes itself to be?

Only time will tell. But there’s hope in my heart even as I ask myself the questions. Thank God for that.