In November 1969, the great Nina Simone released what would be her entrée to mainstream popular culture, one of her biggest selling records ever, and an anthem of a movement that, robbed of its messenger 19 months earlier in Memphis, still carried forth his message:
To be young, gifted and black
Is where it's at.
The Simone song, "Young, Gifted and Black," has been covered by everyone from Aretha to Dionne Warwick to a pre-fame Elton John and remains Simone's great crossover triumph.
Most recently, the idea of being young, gifted and black has acquired an unprecedented burnish on the American experience, and not just because Barack Obama won the election.
Now that President-elect Obama has put in place his cabinet and advisers—informed by sensitivities to gender, ethnicity and race—it's plain to see that YG&B isn't just a state of mind; it's becoming a fact of our next national leadership.
From Melody Barnes, 44, named director of White House Domestic Policy Council, to Rob Nabors, 37, the next deputy director of the Office of Management; from Susan Rice, 44, the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations to Eric Holder, 57 (OK, youngish, gifted and black), the Attorney General-designate, to Desiree Rogers, 49, the next social secretary, a body of talent is taking shape in the aborning Obama administration. It's not only a vanguard of new political talent, but also a harbinger of black and minority capability poised to make its presence felt far beyond the Beltway.
It is, of course, anyone's guess as to how many of the 300,000-plus résumés that have carpet-bombed the Obama-Biden transition office are from black and minority job seekers. It's undeniable that Obama's election, and the make-up of his corps of advisers, has sent a signal to African Americans across the country, young professionals hoping to make their mark in a government they believe may have a place for them like it never has before.
The fact that most of them won't gain entry to the White House as anything other than part of a tour group almost doesn't matter. What's important is the sense of possibility Team Obama imparts—the feeling that the way is clear for black and minority scholars and business people, writers and thinkers to attain a visibility and influence, by virtue of both their competence and their unique worldview, unlike any other time in the nation's history. Not just in Washington, D.C., but everywhere in the country.
"[Obama's] network of black executives, lawyers, fund-raisers and advisers stretches from Chicago to Cambridge, Mass., to Wall Street to Washington, D.C.," the Wall StreetJournalnoted in a Nov. 6 article on black power brokers. "They are also bound by an intricate social web that operates largely out of sight from whites: family connections, black law-school alumni organizations, black fraternities and sororities, as well as popular vacation spots for affluent African-Americans like Martha's Vineyard."
There may be a temptation to look at this as the emergence of Obama's "Talented Tenth," a revival of the phrase coined by W.E.B. Du Bois to define a class of intelligentsia that would lead black America to a hypothetical promised land. The phrase itself, for all its grand intentions, came to exclude as many as it included.
What Obama is doing runs deeper. There was a common rhetorical thread throughout his campaign: Obama spoke to Americans across the usual lines of distinction. But implicit in his message of hope and possibility was the transmission of the idea to beleaguered African Americans that being young, gifted and black isn't so much a matter of degree or pedigree as it is a shift in our perception of ourselves, our potential, our reason for being. For all the trappings of the high office he's about to inherit, it all really started for Barack Obama when he was a grassroots community organizer, when he was that YG&B brother down the block.
Almost 40 years ago, Nina Simone helped to cement a phrase in both the popular lexicon and the emotional armature of black America. But now, with Barack Obama ready to raise his hand and make history, the idea behind the phrase is what's indelible, more now than ever before. For all of us.
Michael E. Ross is a regular contributor to The Root.