We must face the sad fact that at 11 o’clock on Sunday morning, when we stand to sing ‘In Christ there is no East or West,’ we stand in the most segregated hour of America.
(UC Berkley’s Oakland North, February 15, 2012)
This is the famous and widely reported declaration Martin Luther King Jr. made during, what turned out to be, his last Sunday sermon before he was assassinated. He delivered it at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC in 1968.
Alas, it speaks volumes that, almost 50 years later, America not only remains as segregated on Sunday during church services, but seems equally so on Saturday during social occasions. This was brought into stark relief today when pictures of George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin’s wedding party went viral on social and mainstream media.
But let me hasten to clarify that I really couldn’t care any less who White folks invite to their nuptials. It’s just that Clooney is a vocal, proud, and celebrated Hollywood liberal. So, if even he could have a wedding party as lily-White as his apparently was, the sad fact is that the wedding hour on Saturday might be the second most segregated hour in America.
After all, from Hollywood to Washington and even throughout Africa, no White celebrity appeared to have nurtured more cross-racial/cultural friendships than he. Yet, while it’s understandable that Barack Obama had far more pressing matters, it strains credulity that every one of his other Black “friends” was otherwise occupied.
It would be an entirely different matter, of course, if George and Amal had followed Brad and Angelina’s walk down the aisle by having a more private, family wedding held at their own home. Instead:
More than 150 Hollywood stars and luminaries of the art world will travel down one of the world’s most famous waterways tomorrow (Saturday) for the wedding of George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin, his British fiancée.
The guests, who are expected to include Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Matt Damon, Cindy Crawford, Bono from U2, the opera tenor Andrea Bocelli and the singer Lana Del Rey, will be ferried from the Hotel Cipriano, on the island of Giudecca, to the Aman hotel on the Grand Canal, Venice’s only seven-star hotel, where the wedding reception is expected to take place.
(National Post, September 26, 2014)
Incidentally, even though his face does not feature in any of the pictures, I’d be really surprised if Clooney’s Ocean’s Eleven co-star Don Cheadle does not show up at some point to give this three-day affair at least the token appearance of integration. Apropos of pictures, in every one of her, Amal looks like one of those mannequins who strut their skeletal stuff on the catwalks of fashion week. Which I suppose proves that the organ that attracted George is the one between her ears.
In any event, this lily-White wedding provides spectacular affirmation that MLK’s dream of a country where Blacks and Whites not only work and worship but also socialize together remains deferred…
New Yorkers generally accept that, even though Whites and Blacks interact as professionals, they rarely socialize as friends. Which, incidentally, is why the belated casting of a Black love interest for one of the male characters on Friends during its final season seemed so woefully contrived.
(“Just a Little Rant about ‘Desperate Housewives’,” The iPINIONS Journal, November 22, 2005)
Don’t get me started on the hypocrisy inherent in tabloid-hating “private” George having a tabloid wedding worthy of Kim Kardashian.
All the same, iPINIONS hopes George and Amal live happily ever after… as improbable as that prospect might be given the track record of celebrity marriages. No doubt their everlasting happiness will depend on George being able to cope a lot better with Amal (and her scene-stealing mother) continually upstaging him than Prince Charles was able to with Lady Di doing so.
NOTE: The occasion would be no less sad if a Black celebrity like Will Smith were having a Jet-Black wedding today.
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