Racing Against Inequality

When I was growing up on the south-east side of Madison, WI, I did not realize that racism existed. As a 5 year old attending school for the first time, I was lucky enough to attend one of the two poorest and most racially diverse schools in the city. I say lucky because I was a blonde-haired blue-eyed White girl from the outskirts of the city, one of the only farm kids at the school. Most of my friends were Black or mixed, and most were working class or lower-middle class. I didn't look like most of my friends, and I remember meeting a boy in my class who had the most beautiful skin color and thinking that I wished I could look like him, that I hoped one day I would have children who were that beautiful. Not a single day of my life has gone by where I wasn't grateful for the chance to grow up believing that people were people, regardless of skin color.

One of my best friends went to a different elementary school and I remember when we first met how shocked she was that I knew Black kids and was friends with them. She had only met one Black person in the first decade of her life and was visibly frightened of them. I was horrified, and astounded. It had never crossed my mind to be afraid of a Black person, or to fear talking to them. The only boys who had ever bullied me had been White; the only girls who had made fun of my hand-me-down clothes were the "cool" White girls. I had always had a complex where I wanted to be Black, and here was this new friend of mine showing me just how pervasive and insidious racism is in our country, feeding on the ignorance and stereotypes we perpetuate. After years of friendship we have both been influenced greatly by that initial contact, and today she is engaged to a Palestinian, a man her 11 year old self would have been terrified of.

Only in my college years have I been able to come to terms with what I always considered "my accidental Whiteness." It was only after living in Ghana for a summer, where I felt more alive than ever before, that I realized my Whiteness was nothing more than a state of mind. I could not wish to be Black anymore, I had to come to terms with my skin color and realize that it had never stopped me from being true to myself and to my friends and family. I was honored when my Ghanaian host mother symbolically gave me her name; told my parents that she had become my mother on the other side of the Atlantic. Back at school, my closest friends invited me to come to a celebration honoring the Black student graduates at Ithaca College and Cornell, and I did not realize until I walked in that I was the only white female invited, and yet I belonged with these friends who are also my family.

I am glad that there is a presidential candidate who is candid enough to speak about the racial issues which this society too often tries to ignore or hide, as it does with issues of gender and class.

It is time for a national dialogue, it is time for those of us who came of age as the Towers fell and who are the children of Vietnam veterans, Second-Wave feminists, and Civil Rights marchers, to speak up about the issues that affect us, the inequality that our parents fought to end and that we remain embedded in.

We are a facebook generation living in a myspace era; even the language is narcissistic and indifferent to the problems of others. Yet so many of us have the desire to demand that change occur, to demand better funding for education, universal healthcare, and an end to a war that my friends have gone to fight in, some since they were 17, when it first began, and who today are on their 3rd or 4th deployment at the age of 22.

At a time when our government has taken away habeus corpus and implemented not only the Patriot Act but also the Military Commissions Act, and, until recently, the Protect America Act, there is too much fear in this country: fear of external threats, but among many of us who seek change and desire greater respect for our civil liberties and the abolishment of institutional and socially constructed inequalities, there is also fear of internal threats, fear that our voices will be silenced.

Some of our parents marched in the streets until their feet bled and their voices were hoarse, and yet they believed so sincerely in the principles for which they stood that those were small prices to pay compared to the toll that prejudice takes on us.

Today we have facebook groups to rally around causes, claiming to be a million strong. But we are too afraid to speak too loudly, too afraid to demand in person, out loud, that change happen. So now, when commentators and pundits marvel at the momentum of the Obama campaign, I wonder at their naiveté. Isn't it obvious? There is finally a voice that is speaking up eloquently and with fierce determination for the change we have secretly, and sometimes openly, been craving desperately.

I am turning 21 years old in one week, and as I look back on my young life I am struck by the brief but telling political history. As a toddler people my brother's age were going to the Persian Gulf, in elementary school I heard murmurings of the genocide that ravaged Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing that fractioned Yugoslavia, as a pre-teen I watched as the nation became obsessed with the OJ Simpson trial and with Bill Clinton's extra-marital affair, and then, in my first year of high school I remember telling my friend that joking about a plane flying into the WTC wasn't funny, only to find out it was true, mere months after a man was elected president whom I feared greatly for his politics and for the fluke that put him there. Since that time I have watched my friends go to war, watched my family tear itself apart because of political and religious differences, dated men whose skin color next to mine still makes people stare, I have visited and lived abroad, and in college I became a politics major, preparing for what I hope will be a lifetime of diplomatic efforts and commitment to social justice. Members of my family do not have access to health care, friends of mine cannot get on a plane without facing racial profiling, and I struggle to earn respect as a young, blonde, female politics teaching assistant.

It is beyond time for a president who understands what the south-side of Chicago looks like, who knows that there are countless people without adequate health care who deserve it, too many children like my friend who are growing up in segregated schools, and too many like myself who attended schools without enough funding and support to guarantee that the students would get to high school without getting shot in a gang fight or getting pregnant as children themselves.

I worked with third graders last summer who have been systematically disenfranchised and deprived of the kind of educational support they need in order to avoid being "left behind," and the support is not coming, especially not from a government which proposed a 1% decrease in the amount of education spending for the current fiscal year, while also clamoring for better implementation of flawed No Child Left Behind standards.

Let us finally, as a nation, recognize our role as citizens, and be brave enough to vote for the candidate who knows that these travesties exist, and who can articulate the problems and the kind of dialogue and change that needs to happen if the next generation is going to have a chance at a more peaceful and more equal future. Hubert H. Humphrey said, "What we need are critical lovers of America - patriots who express their faith in their country by working to improve it." That is the kind of patriot I have always been, and I am glad to be supporting a presidential candidate who, in my eyes, embodies that kind of patriotism as well.