Getting down to brass tacks on the Hope front
I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about relationships. She is a white woman married to a white man. I am a white woman married to a half Philippino man who looks more, say, Samoan. I have never considered myself to part of a "mixed race" marriage, though I suppose that, technically, I am. I can tell you flat out that we have never seen any discrimination and our children, who both look plain ol' white, have never faced any, either.
I have been in relationships, however, where this wasn't the case. I have, in my lifetime, had relationships with two black men. In the first, he was much more open about the relationship than I. I come from a Southern family and we were living in Virginia and while I wasn't embarassed to be with him, per se, I was fearful of people's reactions. I was afraid to hold hands in public. He would laugh at me, but was patient.
In the second relationship, about five years later, I was the one who was more confident. Granted, we were living in the nineties instead of the eighties and I had worked this ground before. But we were still in Virginia and let me assure you that it was not universally OK.
My friend and I started talking about these relationships because she had come across an
article from The Dallas Morning News talking about Barack Obama as the "symbol of acceptance" for some mixed-race couples. It's old news by now that Sen. Obama is, himself, the product of a white mother and a Kenyan father. If I thought that my relationships faced discrimination in the eighties and nineties, that was child's play compared to what Obama's parents must have faced in the early sixties.
To be sure, that discrimination has not passed entirely. And interractial couples are keenly aware of that. They are also keenly aware of the issues that their children, who grow up with the same identity issues Obama discussed in his books, face and the discrimination they can face from both races.
When my husband, the product of a white father and a Philippina mother, was a child, he found himself first not white enough for his classmates in Wilmington, DE, and then not black enough for his classmates in urban Pittsburgh. When Obama used this same language in his speech on race on March 18 of this year, he was speaking directly to my husband and the millions like him in this country who have been straddling the racial divide their whole lives.
In the midst of the policy talk and the endorsements and the super delegate count, some of the more powerful and simpler messages of Obama's candidacy can get lost. And some of them aren't even about what he has to say. Some of them are simply about who he is. He is a singular candidate, symbolizing, with his person, a message of Hope to millions in this country about what is possible for their lives. This isn't high brow talk about economic policy that, let's be honest, leaves most people glassy eyed. This is the Hope that tells millions of Americans that it's OK to be who they are. And it tells millions of others that it's OK to let those people be who they are.
Discrimination, in this country or any other, won't go away. We can never be so polyanna to think that human beings will ever lose the capacity for hate. But we've come a long way and Obama is helping us go farther faster than we might have thought possible.
