"I just voted for Obama. Who thought this would ever be a possibility? let’s pray it happens."
—Text Message I received this morning from my best friend from childhood, a man born to a white mother from Illinois and a Nigerian father who left when he was two (I know, the similarities are eerie). A man who knows racism first hand.
To say that today is a historic moment is to minimize what is about to happen. Today I voted for 9 year old me. 9 years old is when I first discovered racism.
As a child of a mixed family I remember going to my grandfather’s funeral in rural North Carolina in 1982 as a 9 year old. Our family was unusual even by Washington D.C. standards : two white kids, one black kid, one Vietnamese kid and two white parents. But that is all I knew. I knew we were different in some ways but our difference was my normality. My parents fiercely protected that innocence and made sure we lived and went to schools in a community that celebrated, embraced and in many ways looked like our family.
That all changed on that trip. I will never forget the stares and whispers at the gas stations as our happy band poured out to go to the bathroom. And then we went to eat in a diner off the interstate somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina. To this day I can remember how the entire place got quiet after we walked in. And then many turned around and simply stared at us while we ate. I remember feeling uncomfortable, but mainly because my parents were acting so weird. For the first time in ages us kids ate our food in silence, being stared at like exotic animals in the zoo.
I learned we were different that day. I learned the race mattered to alot of people. So much so that it permanently scarred my African-American brother and affected our family in ways the reverberate today.
So I never thought I would see the moment that I could fill out a ballot for a black man with a funny name for President. As I filled in the little oval next to Barack Obama’s name yesterday I thought to myself - "this is for those folks in the diner all those years ago that made my family feel so uncomfortable and taught a 9 year old all about racism without ever saying a word".
Here is a picture of my family at my sister's wedding. They didn't win.
Vote Hope.
Cross posted at http://finnswake.wordpress.com/