We all have our family stories. One of my family stories is of my great grandfather who was a sheriff in Kentucky. The story goes that each election day, he would sit on the courthouse steps with a roll of dollar bills. As black men passed him, he would hold out a dollar and say, "Who you gonna vote for today, Boy?"
The answer he usually got was, "I’m voting for you Mr. Jim." That answer got the voter a crisp dollar bill. That was pretty good money in the 1940s. Sheriff Jim won the election handily each time he ran.
My grandfather told me this story with pride. I have carried it as a great shame. My great-grandfather and my grandparents were in the Klan. I have seen a photo of my father in a Klan robe when he was 5 years old. People seemed to think it was funny.
My father went into the Air Force. Serving in the military can sometimes overcome a family history of racism. He didn’t think the Klan robe picture was funny. But he showed it to me to teach me lessons about our history and his hope for our family's future. He became the bridge from my ancestors to me, the promise of a more enlightened way of thinking.
I learned from my father about judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. (For some years, I thought he made that up.) When we would talk about my family’s racist history, he would always make a point to tell me that the people in the robes were not the biggest danger anymore, though they had been once. No, the biggest danger was in the whispers. The dangerous man was the man who pledged himself to equality and then slurred his neighbors with innuendo and slurs in the shadows.
We agreed that racism would always exist, but that it would get better each day as people like my grandfather passed away. It is not that I wanted my grandfather to die, but I certainly did not mourn the passing of his view of the world.
My father passed away last year too. He was a long-time admirer of John McCain. Of course, he never saw THIS John McCain. I knew my father pretty well and I think he would have been painfully disappointed in the way this campaign has unfolded. I have very little doubt as to how he would have voted.
I have children of my own to raise now. This election gives voice to every lesson that my father ever tried to teach me. It is a daily illustration of how much has been overcome and how far there is to go. Barack Obama is a gift to our children, win or lose. And John McCain has given us a gift as well in these past weeks.
Now, it may not be a good thing that my three-year-old son sees any light skinned black man on the television and says, "there is Arack Obama!" Of course, often it is Barack Obama on the television, but we’re working on him understanding that it is not always the case. He’s three, so there is time.
The greater gift is to my older children who see someone who is so clearly more intelligent, more accomplished and more capable than most people they’ve ever met. They understand that he is in a position to serve our country in our time of need. To them, noting the extra melanin in his skin would be like mentioning that someone had brown hair. They know it matters more than that for some reason, but they don’t really understand why. I’m grateful for that.
John McCain has actually given us an equally important lesson for our children. My father told me about the whispers. He told me about the danger, not from the men in the robes but from men and women who hid their true bigotry behind a smile. Now I don’t need to tell them the stories. My children can actually hear someone say, "Who is the REAL Barack Obama?" They can hear a woman say, "He doesn’t come from the same America we know." John McCain and Sarah Palin are whispering out loud.
The good news is that my kids get it. They see it for what it is. They are learning more from McCain/Palin than I could ever teach them. It feels perverse, but I am grateful to them for teaching my children a lesson that I am not capable of giving them.
I’m glad that my children can see these things. They can learn lessons quickly that my grandfather, my father and I took years to come to.
In three generations we have gone from my great-grandfather passing out dollar bills to black voters, to his great-grandson proudly casting a vote for a black man for President of the United States. Something that has been a great shame for me has been transcended. My grandfather’s bigotry now serves as a starting point for a story of how far we’ve come.
There will be tears in the booth!