The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities

by Soledad O'Brien;Rose Marie Arce

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  NOT BLACK ENOUGH

  The sun rises over Washington, D.C., like a fluorescent light turned on slowly by a dimmer switch. It is cold, brutally cold, sub-zero when the wind whips across the Mall. Steam escapes from sidewalk grates and hovers in clouds above the lawn. The monuments look like ice castles. I have on so many layers I feel as if I have been wrapped in plastic. It is Martin Luther King Day, 2009. I arrive at our red, white, and blue election truck, a huge bullet of a vehicle with satellite capacity. My American Morning replacements look as if they are reporting from the tundra. They have no heaters and it’s eight degrees out. Their “set” is a tiny perimeter of police tape and lawn chairs exposed to the wind. I have no desire to be one of them anymore.

  I wrap myself up tightly, swallow hot chocolate, demand blankets and replace them on the big lawn. I am going to sit in this frosty wind tunnel at an awesome moment in history. Today we celebrate a man who rallied us to throw down racial barriers. Tomorrow the U.S. inaugurates its first black president. This is about as cool as it gets.

  “I’m Soledad O’Brien,” I tell viewers from beneath my powder blue ski cap. “You are watching CNN’s live coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s national observance, and the buildup, as well, to inauguration day. Barack Obama is going to be sworn in as the forty-fourth president twenty-three hours from right now.” I am live on CNN for the next eleven hours. I am doing a live show on two seminal events in black history side by side. This marathon event feels like a wrap-up to my year of reporting documentaries on Dr. King’s papers, his assassination, and the four hours of Black in America. I have become the go-to reporter on racism and race.

  This is the day before the inauguration but tens of thousands of people have arrived a day early. They gather around me on the Mall. Roland Martin stations himself next to me. He has that great radio voice and knows everything about Dr. King. He is supposed to stay for a few minutes but he ends up staying hours. Andrew Young joins me. He is dizzy with anticipation. Then I interview Representative John Lewis, who spoke on the Mall the day of Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech. At one point we replay the entire speech.

  Then Fred Gray arrives. I yell out to the growing crowd that he was Rosa Parks’s attorney when he was just twenty-five. His presence is riveting. The crowds press in around us to introduce him to their kids. Cheers go up when he speaks. I’m suddenly hosting a parade of civil rights legends. I feel as if I am living history with them, standing in Times Square when the troops come home from battle. My mother used to always say she fought back against racism because America is better than that. I stand with this crowd knowing she is right. The crowd reflects America’s new face. I see white people and black people huddled together behind unbreakable smiles listening to me talk about civil rights history as common history. Some pasty-faced guy named Jim snakes through the crowd with his flip cam and he lures me into recording us together, dancing against the wind on the icy Mall. So many people are stretching their arms into my live shot to take pictures it’s hard to concentrate, but I can’t complain. They all look so happy to be joining me in this bitter cold.

  Brad calls and tells me he wishes he were there with the kids. Hours fly by. Brad keeps watching and calling. I wish I had my family with me. I want them to feel the cold air crackle with excitement, the coming together of so many different Americans on a day recalling great history. I am struck by how many people in the crowd did not support Obama during the election. This is not only about Obama; it’s about what it means to elect a black man in an election where race was not the issue. I want my kids to experience this moment so they can tell their own kids about this day.

  America is about to keep a promise it made of equal opportunity without regard to skin color. The content of our character is on full display. On this same lawn, people greater than us dreamed of overcoming bigotry. Now a black man is about to walk into the White House through the front door. I can hear the excitement in Brad’s voice and everyone I talk to, regardless of race or background. This is the America I celebrate.

  Barack Obama used the civil rights movement as a spring-board for his candidacy. “I am running for president right now because of what Dr. King called ‘the fierce urgency of now,’” he said. “This moment is too important to sit on the sidelines.” Whether he can keep the implicit promise won’t be clear for many years. He is young, low on political experience, serving America as it faces an oncoming recession, two wars, and a lack of faith in government. Today he gets credit for having won the race, for being the black man who broke through. To this crowd, that is thrilling enough.

  One day pushes into the next. People begin to fill the lawn before the sun even rises. They are heavily bundled. They shake from excitement and cold. They sneak around the barricades and fill the Mall, making little huddles until the spaces between them fill up and they become a vast blanket of humanity I leave my hotel at seven a.m. to walk a few blocks to the Newseum building. I am supposed to be on the roof next to Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer by ten a.m. I have three hours to go six blocks but there are now nearly two million people pressing toward the Capitol. I have waited too long. There is no way I’m going to make it there. I am going to miss anchoring the inauguration of a U.S. president, a lifetime opportunity for a journalist.

  I walk a few steps into the crowd. This sea of humans consumes me. I get jostled, dangerously, from one place to another, going nowhere, turning back, pressing ahead and turning back once more. I introduce myself to the crowd. “Hi and excuse me, I’m Soledad O’Brien from CNN and I need to get to that building.” The response is stunning. Person after person does a double take. “It’s Soledad. It’s CNN. Let her through. She needs to be there. Let her through!” There are mostly black people in the crowd. One by one, they push me through. For nearly two hours I make slow progress through this massive assembly. I am propelled by pure excitement. I’m suddenly at a rock concert, the Super Bowl of politics. “It’s Soledad from Black in America! Let her through!” People shake my hand. They snap our pictures together even though we are squeezed so tight we can’t move our arms. Then they push me along. It’s almost as if the show can’t start until I reach the anchor chair. It is insane and more thrilling than any red carpet I’ve ever walked.

  It takes me over two hours to get to my seat next to Anderson and Wolf Blitzer. They look at me like I’ve cut it a bit close. David Gergen sits to one side of me. He has advised four presidents, representing both parties. He says the crowd looks like Mardi Gras in January He can’t believe the pep rally atmosphere they’ve created for a stiff inaugural event.

  Obama’s inaugural speech is not about breaking racial boundaries but about new challenges to our country’s tradition of “hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism.” He tries to credit his successful rupture of America’s ultimate racial barrier to our common good. The divisions in this country make it essential that he be right.

  “This is the price and the promise of citizenship. This is the source of our confidence—the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed—why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent Mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.”

  The president being sworn in is the child of one white and one black immigrant, just like me. It’s a commonality I don’t think I’d absorbed until just then as I was watching it happen. It seems unlikely, but I don’t really think of him or myself as being mixed race. I see him as another black man who may have felt like he didn’t quite belong in any camp. That’s the mind-set that a lifetime of exclusion creates. Now he’s standing up there as a symbol of having breached this great divide.

  The timing coincides with my chief objective as the reporter of Black in America. I spent
my last year fueling dialogue about race. He is a booming voice in that conversation. He has drawn attention for discussing a topic many politicians avoid. No one wants to say the wrong thing. His candidacy has sparked a complicated dialogue about the state of race in America and American racism. It allows us to consider the possibility that perhaps we are pushing past our history of racism. It frees us to consider class as the emerging divider, to consider that many white people haven’t exactly had anything handed to them.

  The crowd erupts the moment he closes and cannons explode in the distance. The United States has completed a respectful change in government during a very trying time. I sit up on an outdoor perch with my colleagues wearing suits under our wool coats because it is so bitterly cold outside, and we intone about what it all means. But in the vast crowd below us, and the line of Republicans and Democrats assembled by the podium, the meaning of this ceremony is clear. We are embarking on a new era of American history. We move on with cautious optimism that we are about to back off on our nose-to-nose confrontations over race, and consider the option of simply talking to each other. That’s if we can all heal our wounds.

  The complaints that I’m not black enough to report Black in America live mostly in blogs. You can find them if you hit the forward arrow a few times on a Google search. The site Fresh Express : The Pulse of Young BlackAmerica criticizes CNN for not picking somebody blacker. “The same station with nary a black woman in any on-air position of substance. There’s no black female Rachel Maddow on CNN. There’s no chocolate Campbell Brown. Hell, not even a ghetto Greta Von Facelift. And no, Soledad does not count.”

  A site called the Secret Council of American Negroes posts pictures of me, of the actor Wentworth Miller, my colleague Suzanne Malveaux, and the major league ballplayer Grady Size-more. We are praised for not trying to “pass.”

  Thestudyofracialism.org displays pictures of my kids and begins a debate over whether they are black. Then on Zimbio.com a blogger called Black Snob adds this to the debate:

  Can Soledad O’Brien embrace blackness while not looking black, not “sounding” black and not being married to a black man? Can she embrace it with blond, blue-eyed children? Have the rules of blackness changed, or are we still playing the same psychological mind games we’ve always played when it has come to race in America? I often say in America you are what you look like? But if you look white but call yourself black, what are you?

  Black in America was a clear assignment. Mark forty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by doing a documentary Answer the questions: How far have we come? Where are we not making progress? The goal was never to examine the whole black experience. We were to tell the stories of a handful of people. Look at the impact of Dr. King’s death on the community as they were coming of age. We chose some people who were wildly successful and others who were terrible failures. What did their lives say about opportunities for African-Americans ? Have they been able to leverage those opportunities? The fundamental question at the center of the documentaries is, Where are we?

  Yet suddenly I’m answering questions about me, just as I had much of my life. Was I black enough? No one was asking Christiane Amanpour, who was born in Iran, if she was Asian enough to cover China. I was neither surprised nor particularly annoyed. I got it. There was concern that if I wasn’t from the community, I might not get it.

  One big fear I had was that the story of black America would seem depressing and sad. It’s undoubtedly the case that some of the stories are depressing and sad but you can’t only tell stories that are outlined by statistics. There is a way to nuance the story so that the community is fully represented. Michael Eric Dyson is extraordinarily smart and articulate and is also one of the happiest and funniest people I know, even if this one personal story is heartbreaking. There has to be a way to present stories that is not simply either/or—that can’t be reduced to good news/bad news, happy and sad. These elements coexist. This was the perspective I was supposed to bring to the documentary That’s what made me black. It was important I reflect that in my work, convey that sensitivity to the viewers.

  Michael Eric Dyson and his brother say their lives were separated by the shade of their skin. But Everett was dealing heroin in his own neighborhood. He wasn’t sticking it to the man. He was peddling dope to black children. He is serving a life sentence for murder. Whether or not he killed a man, he certainly made bad choices. He said that to me when I pressed him. Yet there is no denying his skin color is an issue. Light-skinned people get preference. I remember the photo store where the guy asked: “Excuse me if I’m offending you, but are you black?” It was pretty clear then that skin color makes a difference in the way you are treated. He wanted to know if we were black before taking our picture. Ultimately I have had to learn to navigate this minefield, and I believe there is value in my perspective that is different from what another reporter might bring. I did this piece because I love highlighting the story of Everett and Michael and their two paths to unveil one reality of black life. But I also know that prejudices over skin color are our reality, not our excuse.

  The big surprise for me about skin color is that it matters so much to black people. I am not afraid to be criticized. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and wallowing in self-pity has never been my strategy I learned back in San Francisco that people don’t have to like you. You can be successful even if no one wants you to succeed. But I refuse to just dismiss people telling me that I’m unqualified to be black. I want to understand the anger. The president is mixed race, yet he gets to identify as black. Except for when someone makes a point of telling me he is biracial or “as much as white.” I don’t know if they’re revealing his true colors or finding a conversation starter about my own.

  I find it funny. I grew up with people who never thought of me as white. I was so different from everyone else. I had an Afro. It seemed as if I wasn’t attractive to them. I didn’t fit. Now here I am supposed to be proving I am black! But I was a teenager back then. Now I am a grown-up. I get to have a clear view of who I am and where I’m from. I get to be more than just a skin color; I can be the sum total of my life experience. I can embrace the community where my soul lives. I report on Katrina; does that make me any more black? I report Black in America; does that make me more black?

  Black is not a credential; it’s not even a skin color. African-American culture is so much more than that. I feel like it’s important to say “I’m black.” I’m proud of my roots. I am a bit Irish, too, by way of Australia. Should I not say that? I am certainly Latina. Latino is an ethnicity, not a race. Latinos can be of any color from any place. I can be Latino and also black. So why can’t I have a father from Australia but be black when my mother is black? People looked at me all my life and saw black. And, I am thoroughly proud of the black I am.

  I host big screenings for the Black in America documentaries the summer before the president is inaugurated. I love the questions. The crowds love the stories. I get such hardy applause. But every now and then I am asked why I tell the sad stories. Why do I tell stories about poor people? Why the piece about the former drug addict? Why the guy who gets a degree in jail, then commits another crime after he is released? I recite the statistics on African-Americans and crime, incarceration and poverty I stress that good reporting is about showcasing the range of stories that make up the black experience. I point to all the stories in the documentary about successful black people. The family at the center of my documentary is firmly upper middle class. The people attending their black family reunion came from solid homes with children going off to school, but the bottom line is I am a reporter, not a public relations specialist. I can’t do a documentary about a community facing so many obstacles and not report about struggle. People in the audience applaud when I say that.

  I tell them that there is an implication in American society that black people don’t share American values. I would never do anything to contribute to that myth. I want to sh
ow the face of a community where character counts. I know folks don’t only want to hear sad stories, but there is much to learn from failure; there are many lessons in challenges.

  I begin to report Black in America 2, focusing on African-Americans finding solutions to pressing community problems. The conversations over the documentary have helped me understand why some people attack me for not being black enough. If I am black and I launch a discussion of social ills in the black community, then someone black has said we have a problem. If I am a white person, I am just the enemy once again putting people down. That is easy to ignore. There are some people who just need me to be white. That way what I’m saying won’t count. I can be the enemy, too.

  CHAPTER NINE

  LATINO IN AMERICA

  I enter the Latino Inaugural Gala right behind J.Lo and George Lopez. I wear a floor-length powder blue gown with tiny sleeves. J.Lo’s dress begins at her chest, a deep blue gown pinned together with a big sparkling brooch. The red carpet is a sea of Latinos with standout outfits. There is no Hispanic ball so this is what passes as Latino night at Obama’s inauguration. We follow each other into Washington’s elegant Union Station as Spanish-language reporters ask us, one by one, when there will be an official Hispanic inaugural ball. It’s what passes for an issue when there is nothing else to grab.

  I pass the media scrum. I enter a big side hall reserved for celebrities and press. Applause breaks out as each of us walks in. “Soledad! Soledad!” the crowds yell out. Women grab me. I get pulled in for a kiss on the cheek. A few people talk to me in Spanish. I can understand them but I don’t have enough confidence in my Spanish to say much back. No one seems to care about my marginal Spanish. Latinos always claim me. That’s the wonderful big tent of America’s Latino world. As long as you or any ancestor has a “Maria” or a “Jose” sandwiched someplace in your name, you’re in. Because Latino is an ethnicity, not a race, we get to be black or white or anything in between. Latin America is full of people who are half African or part German Jew, indigenous to South America or mixed with Chinese. Spain may have contributed the dominant culture, but Latin Americans are somewhat of a stew.