A Human's Response to Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro

I am white, male, careening toward 50 . .. . the demographic at which, I imagine, the latest Clinton / Ferraro race-baiting strategy is targeted.  I'd like you to know, Senator Clinton, that I'm having none of it.  I'd also like you to know why.  Not that you care.

There is plenty in my life to suggest that I'd be sympathetic to the idea that a black man has gotten an unfair leg up.  Neither of my parents, the children of immigrants, went to college . . hell, my father didn't graduate from high school.  I grew up among other Italian-Americans in a town almost completely white and Catholic, surrounded by the casual racism that arises from ignorance and ethnic isolation.  I recall, as a little boy, attending mass in another town and seeing a black family in another pew.  I'd never seen a black person in church, and asked my parents, in the car on the way home, if they were Catholic.  I was five.  And I was blessed . . .

It was 1964 and my parents, white, uneducated, barely thirty, with five kids and three jobs, explained to me that God made no distinctions among his children and told me I shouldn't either.  My mother told me that there were churches around the world with all kinds of people in them.  She told me to judge people by what's in their heart, and how they behave, not what they look like.  

This was reinforced to me over and over whenever, as a child, I came home with some random shred of misinformation or racist language that I'd picked up from my friends.  My parents never got mad, but they also never, EVER let it pass without correction.  I recall, more than forty years later, some specific instances of using a racist term that I did not even know the meaning of, or repeating a racist assumption during a dinner table discussion, and having my parents clearly, unequivocally and passionately correct me.  It wasn't considered offensive by my friends because all my friends, like me, were white.

I am now the proud parent of three marvelous children, who have, like many children their ages (17, 20, 22) been "cursed" by their parents with hyphenated last names that never fit completely in the alloted number of squares in any registration form.  One half of their last name is Hispanic.  They have grown up in an age where hyphenated last names are not unusual.  Where complex ethnicity is becoming the norm.  Where distinctions between black and brown and white and whatever are increasingly irrelevant.  

When my son was in kindergarten he came home from school and was telling me a story about his new friend Ben.  I didn't know Ben and asked Gabriel to describe him.  "He's short."  What else?  "He's good at soccer."  Ok . ..I said, what else?  "He rides my bus."  I still didn't know who he was.  Gabriel went on, trying to describe him but nothing rang a bell.  I told Gabriel to point out Ben next time I was at school.  A couple of days later I picked up my son and he introduced me to Ben, who was (and still is) African-American.  Never did it occur to my five-year old to describe his friend by referring to the color of his skin.  My kid was the same age I had been when I could not imagine how a dark skinned person could also be a Catholic.  It stunned me a little, I must admit and I got a lump in my throat as I shook Ben's hand before he climbed on his bus.

And it has brought tears to my eyes more than once to watch my children among their friends, their beautiful, multiracial, polyethnic friends, and see how the country they'll inherit from us is just that much closer to something wonderful than the one I grew up in during the 1960's, when it was struggling to correct it's institutionalized racism.  In my children, I see the realization of the vision of my uneducated but somehow miraculously enlightened parents.  I am grateful to both generations that bracket mine, for what they have taught and continue to teach me.

My parents are now almost 80, are retired in Florida and I'm proud to say, both enthusiastically cast their disputed primary votes for Barack Obama.  

So Senator Clinton and Ms. Ferraro . . . do you actually believe that your ambition, your 'qualifications' such as they are, are so vastly superior to Senator Obama's that they justify the use of 'racial preference' as a legitimate topic of political discourse . .  . in the 21st century . . . in the Democratic Primary.  How can you both, despite your education, your status and your long years of service to various progressive causes, be so monumentally ignorant of the destructive and retrogressive power of these themes.  How can my parents, simple decent people that they are, see what you are blind to?

Whatever you achieve with these tactics will be worth nothing, even if they succeed.  I am saddened and ashamed and disappointed.