Obamanos

I remember when I was working in East Harlem and broke up a fight between kids that were using racial slurs against each other.  When I said to Travis, "it would be like you calling me some nasty word that had to do with being white".  He looked at me very seriously and said, "you ain't white, are you"?   I was flabbergasted.  "What do you mean Travis"?  "Well, white people wouldn't be as nice as you or spend so much time doing things to help us".  Someone had taught him that white was a blanket attitude towards others and I didn't fit the description. At the time, I thought this was both horrifying and vindicating.

This election is one of those events that everyone has to write about.  I wish that my grandmother was alive to see this.  Partly because she hated Dubya so much but partly because she told amazing stories about the racism that she experienced in her life.  She was living in Memphis when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot.  The stories she tells are amazing about how she and my mother's black nanny hid in the back of a liquor store during the riots, both too afraid to go home.  I wish my grandfather could see it too, just so I could watch him squirm over having a black man as his president. 

I cried on election night, I cried during Obama's acceptance speech.  I actually cried when he was elected Senator, because he was so eloquent.  As he was speaking, I said, "he gave us our flag back".  The three days following the election, I worked in Harlem.  I noticed that every black man in Harlem was walking straight with their shoulders back and chests open.  A myth had been dispelled.  I know it is not so simple as that, but for some time let us bask in Americans polarizing and shedding Travis' myth about people's attitudes based on skin color.

Finally, I wasn't a white girl walking into these schools having to prove myself, but rather, an ally.  I had nothing to prove, I had cast my vote in faith of an intelligent thinking man as our president.  People looked me in the eye straight away.  I wish that I had been in every elementary school the day after the election to hear the principals addressing their children with incredible inspiration.

Many of the mothers that I talked to this week said "Now I can tell my children that truly they can aspire to be anything".  

I feel like I can tell my children the same thing, that it is a good thing right now to be a part of a majority of voters and that it is okay to be an American. I know that the road ahead will be a difficult one, but I feel like making sacrifices when there is hope for change.