COMMENTARY | The painting depicts the mood of a specific time and place. A little girl in a white dress walks stalwartly forward, flanked in front and in back by men in suits with armbands, their heads out of frame. She holds a book and a ruler. A tomato just missed her, the remnants on the wall behind. Above her, the racial slur.
Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” a depiction of Ruby Bridges escorted to school by U.S. marshals, now hangs in the West Wing of the White House, on loan from the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., according to Politico.
Ruby Bridges was 6 when she became the target for anger over a changing society. The first to integrate her school in New Orleans, every morning crowds of people showed up to spew hatred, shout racist epithets, and throw rocks at her.
All because of the amount of melanin in her skin.
For the first African-American president of the United States, presidency resembles those school mornings. Though the Secret Service prevents physical assaults, people pelt the president with open insults and thinly veiled comments. In his tenure, Obama’s been called an “Oreo,” an “O-Bam-Eo,” an “arrogant black man,” a chimp, an ape, a “tar baby,” unaccomplished, a “magic negro,” the “cotton-picking president,” the “Affirmative Action president,” a “Food Stamp president,” a Kenyan anti-colonialist and said to be hosting hoodlums “in the hizzouse,” in a short collection of some of the most obvious racism.
Emails depicted him, among the other presidents, as white eyes on a black background; with his head on the body of a donkey, on a food stamp, surrounded by watermelon and fried chicken; and as a witch doctor with bones through his nose. A now-former college linebacker wrote on Facebook, according to AOL News: “all the hunters gather up, we have a #$%&er in the whitehouse.”
Like Ruby Bridges, President Obama is a pioneer. When he took over the Oval Office, he crossed the last threshold of integration. Surely he takes strength from others who passed those invisible lines, who drank from the fountains labeled “white,” who sat in at lunch counters and suffered firehoses while marching, those called names so vile there are no names left beyond, who did not have protection from threats that were not idle, but instead disappeared, or hanged from trees, or were returned to their mothers unrecognizable.
We are living in changing times, and many do not like the change. Read the comments on an article pertaining to race, or on a story about a person of color, and see how easily, how quickly people turn back to that simple thing, that meaningless thing: melanin.
The president’s daily march to school is symbolic, though there are plenty hurling hate. But he has a reminder of a little girl who moved stalwartly ahead. And crowds or no crowds, slurs, tomatoes and rocks alike, that little girl went to school.