Race remains an issue in Obama's America: poet

Neal Hall, a Cornell-educated and Harvard-trained ophthalmologist, or eye surgeon, also achieved All Ivy, All East Coast and All American athletic honours. He co-captained the Cornell Track and Field Team and was named Cornell’s Athlete of the Year. He was inducted into the Cornell University Athletic Hall of Fame. Yet his equally impressive – if more controversial – achievement was to pen a number of poems which were collected and published as a book titled “Nigger for Life” in 2009, which won praise from no less than black American intellectual heavyweight Cornel West. Princeton scholar West praised Hall for his “hypersensitivity to sufferings” and his “capacity to change ordinary people’s philosophy on social and racial issues”.

At the ninth annual Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali, Indonesia, last week, Hall said America is far from becoming a post-racial society, even with Barack Obama now seeking re-election as president of the United States.

Hall read one of his poem, entitled “9-11, 24-7”. Part of it reads:

“a labyrinth of terror buried beneath shallow words on revised pages of America’s inequities dating back four hundred years, when blacks were snatched and kidnapped, ship jacked and hijacked to America’s labour and concentration camps to be bought and sold into unspeakable servitude and land we would come to lose ground to some lesser place and foreign cause.

“For black Americans, 9-11 is 24-7.”

Hall later told The Nation that being black in America, even with all his impressive Ivy League achievements, reduces some of his sense of self worth, even in 2012. He insisted that his collection of poems, despite its seemingly “provocative” title, with the use of the word “nigger”, is not really provocative.

“It’s [racial] prejudice that is provocative,” said Hall, who looks to be in his early 40s and still very athletic. “It is prejudice that is controversial.”

Obama, said Hall, may be America’s first black president, but he is a politician, and Hall said the economic mechanism that ensures that most blacks stay at the bottom of American society is still very much intact.

As an eye surgeon, Hall’s life may be comfortable and respectable. Yet it did not stop him from writing about the racial dimension of his profession.

In another poem entitled “Dr Nigger”, Hall writes in part:

“Dr. Nigger

Can you cure me without touching me with nigga hands

Can you save my life without changing my life…”