Ceilings Removed
’m having a hard time writing about Tuesday. It was such an historic day that I really want to do it justice. But my thoughts are all over the place and I’m not sure that I’ll be able to express them coherently.
I haven’t blogged much about the election, mostly because I felt that despite anything I might have said, some people would have assumed that I supported Barack Obama because he is a black man. As much as it annoys me, there are some who seem to believe that we black people are a relatively simpleminded lot…well either simpleminded or tribal in our mindset in that if you dangled any black candidate in front of us, be they Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Sean P. Diddy Combs, Kanye West or even Ray Ray from down the block, we will support them simply because of the color of their skin. Now perhaps there are some of us who behave in this manner (behavior after the 1st OJ verdict did follow a “rally round the skin color” phenomenon), but I submit that there may have been as many people who voted against Mr. Obama because of his skin color. But despite such singleminded (and nonsensical) reasons some people may have used to make the decision of which candidate they supported, I do not count myself among the singleminded or simpleminded.
There are things I see in Mr. Obama that appeal to me that have nothing to do with the color of his skin, the fact that he’s married to a black woman and has black children. They have to do with his keen intellect, his equanimity and his reputation for being a consensus builder…a uniter. From where I sit and what I know of him, he is not a person who seems to play a game of cronyism or politics as usual.
This country is in a god-awful mess and right now we need somebody with major brainpower to help us even begin to fix this problem. Somewhere during my lifetime it became fashionable to want the leader of one of the most powerful nations in the world to be the good ol’ boy you’d knock back a few with rather than the smartest person we can find willing to do the job. All I know is I respect intellect. I respect people who think and consider and not that damnable stubbornness we’ve been subjected to for the past 8 years that makes some unwilling to recognize that if the path that we’re on leads to failure and crisis, perhaps we should find another freaking path! I could go on but I won’t because I don’t want this post to be solely a paean to President-Elect Obama. I also want to spend a few words on how this historic day affected me.
History was made Tuesday night. And what I knew about being a black person in America changed in a way I neither expected nor anticipated. But for this to really resonate, I have to go way, way back…to a time when dinosaurs roams the earth: my childhood.
I grew up in the late 60s and 70s, long before CDs, ATM machines, and ubiquitous personal computers. I missed the Emmett Till and was too young to appreciate the significance of the Black Power Movement. I did know that my mom, dad, aunt and godparents had broken barriers by graduating from medical school at a time when it was not that common for blacks to go to college, much less have a graduate degree. So I knew that there were worlds open to me if I studied hard and proved that I was smart, skilled and nothing like Jimmie JJ Walker from Good Times. When the guidance counselor (a sista, mind you) looked at me incredulously after I told her that I wanted to go to Yale. “You want to go to Yale?” she said with utter disbelief and derision…until I reviewed my transfer transcript from Le Lycee Francais de Los Angeles with her. The smirk melted from her face and threatened to appear on mine, but I kept myself in check. And later when I recounted the encounter for my mom who almost had to be restrained from visiting down a stream of invective on the sista the next day, I knew that I had the credentials to get places in this world. Even still, there were still ceilings I knew could not be broken.
You know those reruns of Leave it to Beaver where the father tells the Beav, “You could grow up to be President.” And the Beav is all like, yeah, wow! These were not words that we ever heard as children. In many black families such wishful (and fanciful) predictions were either never uttered or were told as lies, with the parent knowing that the likelihood of their brown child’s becoming President of the United States was as likely as the child’s being able to walk directly to the moon wearing flip-flops. There were certain ceilings for little children with nappy hair and dark skin. Becoming President of the United States was a ceiling through which we would never break…or so we though.
When I became a teenager and used to ponder deep thoughts, I used to ask myself which would come first? A white woman as POTUS or a black man? A black woman was just not even something that could enter my thoughts without having my head explode. At the time, I believed a white woman would be elected before a black man since racism would be more virulent than sexism. Now as an aging egalitarian feminist, I have a better sense of the fallacies inherent in that prediction. The female schizophrenia of wanting parity except when it involves motherhood and the dissolution of gender roles make women our own worst enemies. We hinder ourselves because we accept and tolerate our own sexism. I can now see that America in theory was more likely to accept a person of another shade with a penis than a white person without a penis as their POTUS, that is unless the white person without the penis is so menopausal as to be essentially sexless (meaning genderless and not without having nookie) like Maggie Thatcher. But that is a discussion for me to take on another day.
Back to last night…my little brother called me from California as the election turned in Obama’s favor. I was surprised to hear from him as we do not speak all that often. He was positively giddy; I was, in turn, giddy. It was as if we were children together again back in that house in Ladera Heights. My god, what this all means!
We spoke of our children and how now, because of this evening, Athena, Erik, and Zara could be told with honesty and sincerity that they could grow up to be POTUS. The ceiling that we had lived with and understood as our limit…our outer achievement boundary based on nothing more than the skin color we had been born with had been removed by Barack Obama. Our children had no more ceiling! There were no words.
I want to be completely honest with you here: I did not believe that in my lifetime a black person would be elected to the office of President of the United States of America. Tuesday was the day I thought I would never, ever, ever see. Even throughout this election cycle, I didn’t dare hope that he might be elected. And then when I started to hope, I still felt that a la Chris Rock’s riff about it, that somehow, someway people would find a way to change the rules so that even if Mr. Obama did win, he wouldn’t really be allowed to be President. That is the paranoia and pessimism that I carry in my heart. But there it was on every network including the dreaded Fox News Network, results were called in favor of President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama.
Tears began stinging my eyes and a huge lump formed in my throat. All I could do was repeat helplessly to AdoringHusband, “I never thought I’d see this day.” As he held me while I cried my happy tears, I thought of my mother, my grandparents, and those others who had not lived to see this amazing day. Who would have believed it? I, the pessimist, most definitely did not. But Mr. Obama showed us what hope can do.
And then there is a new or renewed feeling of belonging that came with this beautiful Tuesday. When Mr. Obama took the stage in Chicago’s Grant Park and spoke to us all as Americans it was as if I suddenly belonged in this country again. Now I know I’ve spent a bit of time talking about the profound impact that our electing a black POTUS had on me but now I want to shift gears. The feeling of belonging again has nothing to do with the issue of race. It had to do with another of the major draws of the Obama campaign: unity. Within the campaign Mr. Obama had the goal of uniting us all despite our differences under one United States of America. For so long during these past horrific eight years, I felt as if I wasn’t really an American, at least not the type of American that GW Sock Puppet Bush, our current POTUS, tends to consider his version of what an American should be. Let me explain this a little better.
A long time ago in my former life as a teendoc, I gave a presentation at Abington Hospital for parents about how to talk to their teens about sexual issues. The talk was very well received, but there was one letter of complaint sent to the president of Abington Hospital. The letter writer, a woman from an abstinence only organization complained that I had not enough time (all of my time) giving parents information about how to teach abstinence. I ended up crafting a beautifully measured reply to her letter about adolescents, sexuality and the challenges of puberty in the 90s. The president of Abington completely approved of my words and the letter was sent. A few days later, she, surprisingly, suggested that we meet for lunch to discuss the topic further. It was my first experience as a full-grown professional adult having civil discourse with someone whose views were diametrically opposed to mine.
We met at one of my favorite West Philly spots, The White Dog Cafe. We held off on the deep dive into our respective positions until our food arrived. Her position was one that I had heard many times before: abstinence until marriage is the only viable standard for a teenager to be held to, and, as such, no other contraceptive or STI education should be offered because this would give the teen the belief that if they couldn’t attain the highest standard (abstinence) then they could make do with 2nd or 3rd best (condoms and birth control). She felt that talking about contraception and STI education was giving them permission to not strive for complete abstinence until marriage.
And I, for my part, attempted to explain to her why that approach was so problematic for me. As a physician, I have neither the right nor the heart to only care for and respect those teenagers who hold to one standard of behavior. Her position, to me, felt like I would be saying to the teen, “if you’re good enough to do what I feel you should do then I will care for you and treat you with respect as my patient. But if you do not meet this standard, then while I might treat your infections and pregnancies, I will not give you respect or compassion because you are not behaving in a way that I approve of. I will judge you as being ‘less than.’” Both as a doctor and as a human being, that type of approach is unconscionable. I have no right to sit in judgment of anyone. I open my arms and my heart to all my patients whether they are the epitome of virginity or they are sex workers struggling to find a place to sleep. I do not hold one person, one standard, or one set of actions to be of such great value that I would turn away those who were not able to or willing to meet that standard. That is anathema to my ethos.
She looked at me and tut-tutted over my ignorance. We concluded our lunch and neither of us were any further swayed to the other’s position, but at least the dialogue had been had…FWIW.
I share this experience with you to frame what I have felt like during the past eight years of Sock Puppet’s Presidency. The Sock Puppet and his conservative base have given out vibes just like that abstinence lady I had lunch with. If I met a certain standard, behaved a certain way, and looked a certain way, then I could be considered a real American. If that isn’t the politics of division, what is? Come on! We’ve got these, these…people saying that liberals hate real Americans and that we should begin investigations of anti-American sentiment of people in congress. McCarthy anyone?
And what happens if I don’t fall in line with what these loons believe a real American should be? What if I happen to believe that we have not yet crossed into being the land ruled Christian theocracy or if I believe that women have the right to choose what to do with their bodies or I believe that gay people have as much of a right to marriage as anyone else (if Britney Spears isn’t singlehandedly ruining the institution, I do not see how gay people will “ruin” traditional marriage…from where I sit, with the divorce rate at 50%, traditional marriage is on life support as it is), well any and all of those positions will put me in the other category. I was not included when the Sock Puppet spoke to America. He spoke to and cared only about his base, the people who thought like him and met his standards…just like abstinence lady only gave the time of day to the kids who met her standards in her program. If not, they were on their own. So here for 8 years we’ve had the real Americans and the others, like me. And we felt ourselves grow even more fragmented as a people.
But last night… last night was something incredible (I need a better word). Last night President-Elect Obama spoke to the United States of America: all of us, old and young, straight and gay, black, white, brown, yellow, and all the mixtures in between. The beauty was that we did not have to agree on all things or meet one standard or one belief system in order for us to love this country and be a part of these United States of America. We all belong. We are all included. That is what Barack Obama the uniter has wrought. We are all Americans. We need to stop focusing on that which divides us but instead focus on what connects us even if we have different faiths, different skin colors, different sexual orientations or different languages, we can all love this country and want to rescue it from the ruin where it is heading. That is what I saw last night on the faces of everyone as they celebrated in Chicago and New York and Philadelphia and all the other places I watched before I went to sleep. It was inclusion, it was love of country, and it was hope.
Thank you President-Elect Obama.
So very well said!
You totally made me cry.
what a wonderful post. you capture this moment so well — one we’ve been waiting for and doubted we’d ever see.. I’ve been weepy since tuesday night.
Very very well said. Thank you.
Like you, I didn’t think that I would see this time in history. I knew it would eventually arrive but to see it unfold, fills my heart with such hope for our country.
I am a 51 y/o, white, mother, wife, friend and employee. I consider myself “typical” off my community most of the time. I am in the minority in my mostly repub. community and didn’t have much support when I announced that I truly believed that Obama would be all that he appears to be, and more.
It pains me that I will have to ask all those naysayers to eat their words at some point in the next 4 (maybe
years. I truly believe and Tuesday changed not only the US but the rest of the worlds opinion of the US.