I’ve been a strong supporter of Barack Obama for many reasons: his leadership style, his practical liberalism, his focus on the future and his goal of bringing Americans from all walks of life together to get things done. I also support him because he’s black.
Don’t misunderstand me—it’s not that I wouldn’t be supporting him anyhow, or that voting for a black man makes me feel good as a white person, or anything as surface or superficial as that. But his race and his background is important to me, because I’ve lived in so many places where largely African-American, Latino, or Asian communities were metaphorically walled off, mired in poverty and violence, with too few signs of progress making their way through the neighborhoods. And I wanted so much for children in those communities, for biracial children and children of all colors to have the most positive example you could find of why color doesn’t have to be a barrier to success, and that no matter what color you are, you can grow up to be anything that you want to be—even the President of the United States.
That’s why for me, a single comment was the single best part of the single best story that I read this week: "Tonight is the night that all Americans became one."
This was from a story in The New York Times titled, "Many Blacks Find Joy in Unexpected Breakthrough." The man who spoke those words was a black man, a father, with a young daughter, living in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. How wonderful, in the United States with our history of racial strife, to hear something like this:
Kwabena Sam-Brew, a 38-year-old immigrant from Ghana, doubted that Nana, his 5-year-old American-born daughter, would remember the rally that effectively crowned Senator Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee Tuesday night.
But Mr. Sam-Brew said he would describe it to her: "I will tell her, 'Tonight is the night that all Americans became one.'"
Mr. Sam-Brew, a bus driver living in Cottage Grove, Minn., said Mr. Obama’s achievement would change the nation’s image around the world, and change the mind-set of Americans, too.
I grew up in a large, racially diverse but pretty segregated city when busing was a much-debated and fairly new practice. The African-Americans in that city lived almost entirely in one of the poorest sections of town, and were bussed to schools in more affluent neighborhoods forty five minutes away, where students were mostly white, from families mostly hostile to the idea of busing altogether. There were prejudices on both sides. Black students and white students ate separately, socialized separately, never mixed and rarely even talked. Things were so bad that when the verdict of the Rodney King trial was announced, my middle school has us head home early because they were so afraid of race riots—and indeed riots had already started in the cafeteria by the time the buses came to pick us up.
If you had told any single person in that school, black or white, adult or child, that a black man would stand a fifty-fifty chance of being the president in less than two decades’ time, they would have laughed in your face. Race was a barrier that we white people politely pretended did not exist, but it was there in your face everyday like a thousand yards of barbed wire. We all gathered together in the auditorium every February to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday and sing "Let there be Peace on Earth," but those were just words—a placebo for the deep-seated and troubling race problems in our community and around the country. A black president was nothing more than the punchline to a racist joke.
So to read this, a decade and a half later, as an adult, is simply amazing:
In his remarks Tuesday, Mr. Obama did not mention becoming the first American of color with a real chance at being president of the United States, and, of course, most of the Democrats who had voted for him were white. But for that very reason, many African-Americans exulted Wednesday in a political triumph that they believed they would never live to see. Many expressed hope that their children would draw strength from the moment.
"Not that we’re so distraught, but our children need to be able to see a black adult as a leader for the country, so they can know we can reach for those same goals," said Wilhelmina Brown, 54, an account representative for U.S. Bank in St. Paul. "We don’t need to give up at a certain level."
And Barack Obama, biracial himself, is a success story not just for blacks, but for all people struggling to find a place and having felt like they never quite fit into our society:
Alison Kane, a white 34-year-old transportation analyst from Edina, Minn., said Mr. Obama’s success as a biracial politician would have a similar effect on her 21-month-old biracial daughter, Hawa.
"When she’s out in, God knows where, some small town in rural America, they’ll think, 'Oh, I know someone like you. Our president is like you,'" Ms. Kane said. "That just opens minds for people, to have someone to relate to. And that makes me feel better, as a mom."
"Our president is like you." How long has it been since we had a president that a large number of Americans across the spectrum could say that about? Barack Obama, though not a blank slate and certainly a much-accomplished person in his own right, is also someone that whites, blacks, immigrants, biracial people, Latinos, Asians—can all can see some part of our own story in his. He’s the modern day story of what America can be and what America should be.
And finally, this story that Obama himself told was also powerful part of the story--simply anecdotal, true, but breathtaking in its implications for our country and our future:
"Probably the most powerful story I heard was today at a conference, a woman came up to me," he said in an interview on NBC News. "She said her son teaches in an inner-city school in San Francisco and said that he has seen a change in behavior among the young African-American boys there in terms of how they think about their studies. And, you know, so those are the kinds of things that I think make you appreciate that it’s not about you as an individual. But it’s about our country and the progress we’ve made."