The Secular Saint? Black Personhood Responds to the Passing of Senator John McCain

Senator John McCain died away this Saturday after a protracted battle with a particularly nefarious cancer. All over Twitter, I am able to trace his ascent to hagiography in real time.

Some takes have been lighthearted, focusing on the good looks he retained after five years of torture and captivity by the Vietcong. Others are more serious, pondering his legacy as the last adult in the Senate. He retained an ability to reach across the aisle and forge compromises with Democrats. His politics was built on a perception of straight talk, giving power to his truths. Most importantly, he possessed red lines. In an age of dark money and the public views that all we elect to our legislative body are mercenary hucksters, McCain would not budge on campaign finance and torture in war. Whether we agreed with him or not, his persistence on his issues and his history of physical courage gave him the image of a full human being, and not a political animal, in control of the senior Senate seat from Arizona.

Yet most of Black Twitter hesitated when it came to raising him fully to the angels. McCain voted against Martin Luther King Jr. Day, an insult to the American whom nearly all raise as a secular saint. He consistently voted in line with a party that is existentially hostile to the rise of a black and brown planet, toeing the line with a party that supports gerrymandering on a racial basis and using any and all means to strip black folk from the ballet. Despite his rhetorical war with the criminal from New York, he was an early supporter of the wall on the Mexican border. All of these actions muddle his legacy among the melaninated.

I am exhausted. I used to blog weekly as a way of keeping my mind engaged with the wider world. I would steal an hour or two a day to explore history, fiction, and current events in developing my understanding of black personhood in the American Experiment. But for the last eight months, I have been enmeshed in a fang bearing crash course on the nature of power within my organization. I am coming out on the tail end of it—victorious, I hope—with some insights on power, what it means for black personhood and how we choose to come to terms with Senator John McCain;

Power does not have a nature that lends itself to sharing. McCain experienced this directly when he was shot down over Vietnam. His arms never healed, and his injuries denied him for the rest of his life the ability to raise his arms above his head. To endure such torture requires immeasurable physical courage. Yet he also lacked the political courage to tell his constituency that going against institutionalizing a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. was wrong. Such a decision was made, again, to retain his power; because power cannot be shared, he did everything in his control to preserve the portion he had.

Power is also contextual to the people who perceive it. For most of the nation, McCain retained a gravitas and authority that was more powerful than his mistakes. He was wrong on Iraq. He was wrong to elevate Sarah Palin to national prominence.  Yet most people will remember him for his final political decisions—to give Senator Mitch McConnell, with his face stitched up, the thumbs down on repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Yet black people, and black personhood, will acknowledge him most for molding our perception on the limits of his power. For all his mythology and directness, he could not overcome the man who would become the first black president. McCain’s martial fury could not overcome the change and hope that emerged from the black skin which spring from a Kenyan father and the Hawaiian sun. McCain’s defeat, and Obama’s rise, showed us that power did not preclude defeat and criticism.

His defeat prefigured Black Twitter’s vehement debate over his legacy. As a rebel people, we have always marched to the beat of different leaders; only in this late stage of capitalism has our leader simultaneously been the president of the United States. Because of Obama’s victory, the alternative take has now become our mainstream. And thus we engage all over Al Gore’s Internet on Senator John McCain, a man who showed valor toward our empire, a man worthy of decent literature, and a man who showed the promise and limits of power.