Quote Of The Day: An American Abroad’s Awe Of Post-Election America

Our political Quote of the Day comes from author Carol Guild, who writes via Pajamas Media of her awe as she looks at post-election America from London:

Over the past two weeks the outpouring of British newspaper, radio, and television punditry has been staggering in volume. Staggering in variety? No. One theme that seems to obsess British journalists has been a grim, humorless regurgitation of the most negative aspects of American history. One would think that a hundred years’ war between white and black Americans has been unfolding on the streets of every corner of America, that a truce has been declared with the Obama victory, but that any moment now the war will resume. It is truly mind-boggling that commentators in Britain, some of whose knowledge of American history and cultural evolution borders on the comical, and some of whom rarely visit the United States, have used the election result to condemn every aspect of American interracial life. I simply will not accept that the black experience has not improved since the days of Jim Crow of my childhood; nor will I buy the picture generated by the British media of a nation of despicable racists hell-bent on oppressing every person of color from sea to shining sea.

In my play, A Room at Camp Pickett, written in early 2004 and performed in first-draft form as a “rehearsed reading” at the London Africa Centre in August of that year, I provided a narration. It is unbelievable but true that I mentioned Barack Obama in this part of the text, saying he could be “the one” black America has sought since the assassination of Martin Luther King. What British commentators do not grasp is that Americans like myself, who grew up in James Baldwin’s “fire this time,” see the Obama election as a natural progression following on the ascension of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to international distinction within the context of a Republican administration, for heaven’s sake.

Read it in full.