Prepping myself for a departure from Facebook by copying over some things to my blog site, which is still under (re)construction. Currently reading the posts from January 20 & 21, 2009, the day of and after Obama‘s inauguration. Soooooo many mixed feelings about that day now.
I was with Leah, Ming-Han, Ralf and others at a screening of the inauguration at a huge hall down near Nollendorfplatz station. Photo and video of us – because we were quite the multiethnic group – made it around the world. My friend Hans saw us on MSNBC and several others spotted the photo below. In the Kurier, another publication, Ralf and I were identified in a photo as Tamoni and Klaus, which Ali said was because they didn‘t think Tammi sounded black enough, lol. One photographer wanted to take my picture but just me, not with the others, because they just needed photos of black folks, lol. Another reporter asked me if I thought Obama was “Superman,“ I kid you not.
Seriously, there was so much promise then. An absolute assclown of an Uncle Tom/Ruckus type wrote “Racism in America is over“ for Forbes in December 2008. (And dude is still caping for white supremacy online!) I cannot begin to scratch the surface on how brutalizing it‘s been to live through all of the years in between, even from a distance.
But, yeah, here we are celebrating hope and opportunity in 2009.
