It should’ve been California!

Dear Children,

On November 5th, 2008, the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, became the first black president of the United States of America.  It wasn’t supposed to happen.

Black people first came to the Americas as slaves. For the next three hundred years, Africans and Americans of African descent–in short, your ancestors–were held in legal bondage in the United States, mostly in the South.  It took a civil war, which ended more American lives than any war since, including two world wars, to end the practice.

For the next century after that, however, African-Americans were still subject to Southern laws of segregation–referred to as “Jim Crow” laws–that were so callous and brutal that African-Americans weren’t much better off than their slave forbears.

Though there were considerable opposition from every corner of American society, the plight of African-Americans in the United States was allowed because the myths surrounding African-Americans were disseminated for so long, through so much of society and were so pernicious that even African-Americans themselves began to internalize and believe them.

That’s why in February 2007, even after then Sen. Barack Obama had been making a strong case for his candidacy with record breaking fundraising, that an African-American state senator from South Carolina, Robert Ford, endorsed a different, and white, candidate for president of the United States, arguing that he wanted to protect the Democratic Party from Barack Obama.

“Every Democrat running on that ticket next year would lose,” he argued “because [Obama's] black and he’s top of the ticket.”

Republican’s, presumably, agreed. There were three special elections in 2008 to replace Republican members of Congress that had left office since the 2006 elections. The last two were to find replacements for Southern seats in the House of Representatives (Louisiana and Mississippi). In these two races, Republicans pointedly tried to tie the Democratic contenders for those seats to presidential hopeful Barack Obama, clearly trying to play on the history of race in America.

But it just wasn’t American–black and white–hatred of African-Americans that threatened Obama’s historic candidacy, but it was also black hatred of their plight in America that threatened Obama’s candidacy.  Frankly, white Americans’ fear of black retribution has played as much a part in undermining American unity as white injustice against blacks.  That’s why the revelation of Obama’s long time pastor’s own hostility to America nearly doomed his historic candidacy.

Recognizing that the discussion of race in America was poison to his candidacy, Obama first tried to breeze past this particular controversy like he had breezed past the general issue throughout his campaign.  Ultimately, though, he was forced to confront it with a March 18, 2008 speech that tried to not only save his campaign but even tried to re-write the rules for how noble Americans attack the race question in the future.

Within two months, and despite Ford’s fears, Republican hopes and, maybe, because of Obama’s speech and candidacy, those Southern down ticket seats went to the Democrats, in one case for the first time in over a generation. (The third, for the seat of former leader of House Republicans, Dennis Hastert, also went to the Democrats.)

I would argue that the coup de grace to Ford’s argument, however, did not come until Monday, May 19, 2008. On that day, U.S. Senator Robert Byrd endorsed Barack Obama to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States of America.  This is remarkable, in part, because his home state, West Virginia, gave the nod to Obama’s final competition for the Democratic nomination by a 41 point spread.

More darkly, this is also remarkable because Robert Byrd was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, joining at 24 and, eventually, rising to be the president of his local chapter. Then, as a member of the U.S. Senate, Byrd set the record for longest continuous filibuster by one Senator when he spoke against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for 14 consecutive hours.

Thus, with his endorsement of a black man for president, Sen. Byrd bucked history.

And thus, on November 5th, 2008, the United States of America made history.

Love,

Dad

We have iPods older than our children, courtesy of their AC uncle.  I loved mine so much that I’ve since got an upgraded model that allows me to carry pictures of my children and already I’m looking hard at the newest one which allows you to connect to the Internet.  My wife, on the other hand,  hardly uses hers.

But she did on Thursday.

I not sure what motivated her, but she called me from the car to figure out how to play it through the car stereo system.  She stuck with my confused direction long enough to actually get it going.  She must’ve loved it, because her iPod was sitting and playing in the dock of our iPod speaker system playing which, heretofore, I used pretty much exclusively.

As always, it was nice to come home from a day’s work.  Unusually, though, all of my girls had gotten there, first.  And, even more unusually, good music was wafting throughout the house and my oldest girls were cooking.

The memory is hazy, now.  I’m not sure if we had eaten or had yet to eat, but Corrine Bailey Rae’s “Breathless“ came up on the shuffle playlist.  It is a beautiful song, at once light and airy, yet warm and sensual.  It is a love song but it’s also a call to relaxation and good, easy living.

I was moved to answer the call so I picked up Tristan and started dancing. I held her cheek to my cheek and, with eyes closed, slowly twirled and twirled.  When I next opened my eyes, I was shocked to see my wife holding Marcel and dancing, too.  Marcel, for her part, was practicing her slow-dancing skills by lovingly, and hilariously, caressing her mother’s locks.

And so, I think my wife’s iPod has successfully made the case for more use or, as in the words of Corrine Bailey Rae:

“I get so breathless, when you call my name/I’ve often wondered, do you feel the same?/There’s a chemistry, energy, a synchronicity/When we’re all alone/So don’t tell me/You can’t see/Oh!”