Dear Children

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

 

Big Dreams

Whenever I embark on an endeavor important to me, I fantasize that I will play it out in glorious fashion.

We will not only win the Little League championship, I would dream, but I will hit a home run in the effort. I will not only write a screenplay, I’d think, but it will sell $400 million worth of movie tickets worldwide and launch my fabulous Hollywood career. I can’t help it. I even start spending my lottery winnings whenever the Powerball jackpot goes over $100 million. In my head, of course.

Becoming a parent was no different. In Marcel’s case, my dream was that her first words would be “Yes”.

What I didn’t want were her first words to be “No.” I felt that if her first words were “No” then that would mean that I had only ever told her “No.” Instead, I wanted to be the kind of parent that told his child “Yes.”

I wanted to be the kind of parent who not only said, “Yes, you can have that cookie,” but also the kind of parent that said, “Yes, you can read that book; Yes, you can explore that garden; Yes, you can climb that mountain,” and in so doing, teach her that the world really is her oyster and that everything in it is her pearl and, in her possession, that pearl will gleam like it had never gleamed before.

Of course, it took her awhile to get around to saying “Yes.”

But last night, we sat down to watch recording artist Will.i.am’s video mash-up of Barack Obama’s speech after the 2008 New Hampshire primary election for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.

Jesse Dylan’s video features music written by Will.i.am set to the words of that speech. The music is performed by other recording artist who are white and black and old and young. The words are sung or spoken by Will.i.am and a variety of other black, white, Latino and Asian celebrities of the music, television and fashion worlds. They’re performances are intercut with video of Obama speaking on that January day in New England. Together, the effort is nothing short of moving. The video concludes, with it’s chorus, in soaring fashion. “Yes. We. Can.”

Since she is just short of three years old, it never occurred to me in the week since the video’s release to screen it for Marcel. But as I sat to watch it at my home computer for the upteenth time, Marcel joined me. Maybe she wasn’t drawn by the music. Perhaps, she just wanted to sit in Daddy’s lap for a spell. Maybe she really wanted to videocam with my parents. However, the video quickly captured her attention. She insisted that we watch it three times. Then we went downstairs and told Mommy what we learned.

“Yes, we can.”

And, thus, a daddy’s dream came true.