I am posting this because I shared it with a friend who wants now to share it with others. A little background is required on this.
This is a letter I wrote today to an Illinois friend, a white guy (that’s relevant here), who probably won’t vote in November. He pro-Obama and sees no point in voting because Illinois will surely go to Obama.
Ordinarily, when a friend tells me he’s not planning to vote, I don’t find my heart feeling like it’s being scraped against a nutmeg grater. But this time is different. The letter pretty much explains why. But to fully understand it, you need to know two things about my family that my friend already knows:
First: I’m white, as is most of my family, but my younger brother is black. More specifically, he’s like Obama: he’s multi-racial, culturally identified as black, and was raised by white people. That means I’ve spent years witnessing what happens to a black boy and a black man.
For the first time in my memory, my black brother is talking to me about politics in a way that suggests he is part of it. In a way that suggests he has a voice in this world. He said to me a few weeks ago, “We might actually win this thing,” a “we” meaning him as a black man and me as a white woman, a “we” I’ve never heard him use before, and certainly never in that way.
Second: My mother was born in Poland and survived, as a child, through World War II. She was brought to the U.S. after the war. Throughout my childhood, my parents, like a lot of Polish Catholics, were frustrated that so many Americans did not understand what happened to many Poles who were not Jewish. The most relevant bits here are that the Nazis tried very hard to wipe out the intelligentsia of Poland (so they murdered a lot of Polish Catholics), and that, after World War II, the Allies basically let the Soviets have Poland, and so Poland fell behind the Iron Curtain.
Some of my cousins literally jumped ship during my childhood to escape to America, where they could engage in freedom of thought, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech. My mother could not go back to her homeland until 1990, when my other brother and I went with her and my father. We were able to go because the Poles had risen up against the control of the Soviets, and taken back their country.
Dear Bill,
I just took a break from work (which feels SO good today) to read a little Andrew Sullivan, and read this letter from a reader of Sullivan, a letter written by a “white dude” as Sullivan put it:
I went out canvassing yesterday and am going again on Saturday. I have had some remarkable experiences. I approached 2 tall black young guys who were walking on the street I was canvassing. One was without his shirt and when he turned around, I saw he had 2 tattoos on his chest – 3 inch letters, one word HATE, the other PAIN. Yikes! I asked them if they were registered – yes, both of them said. I asked if they were going to get to the polls: yes they were. As I walked away, the tattooed guy says, “Thank you, sir, for supporting Obama”. It was a stunner on several levels (thanking me; ‘”sir”; the look of appreciation of a kid, not a gangster…).
Bill, I guess I’ve done a poor job explaining to you that a big part of why Obama excites me is that the moment strikes me as one of those moments of potential where moving past some of mere identity politics is possible. Obama is enough of a cross-over to result in the sort of situation Sullivan’s reader describes. You would not find a lot of white people campaigning for Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or Condoleezza Rice. You would not find a lot of young black men bothering to register to vote for those people. There’s a possibility here that is rare, in the way MLK was so rare, in the way Lincoln was so rare. Hillary Clinton did not hold out this potential the way Obama does. The possibility feels huge.
On top of all that, or really as part of all that, he truly is an intellectual in his core (I’ve been reading his autobiography, which is obviously that of an intellectual–and see how he is always criticized for thinking a lot about stuff?) and I feel like maybe he would, in some small way, be a bastion against the horrific anti-intellectualism taking place in this country, including in the name of progressive identity politics. I suppose all that is why I can’t relate to how you feel about voting at this moment. For me, the vote will be like a toast to an incredibly wonderful event. It is a moment in defense of–indeed, in celebration of–all I’ve stood for:
Mind (reason) over body (identity).
Even if I were in a sure-thing state like Illinois, I wouldn’t miss voting for the world. When my relatives got to vote for the first time in post-communist Poland, they really only got to vote for the same old people, but it still felt monumental to have meaning restored to the voting booth. That’s how I feel about being able to vote for Obama. I keep flashing to when we were in Poland in 1990, watching ordinary people destroy the statues of Lenin, lifting them up with cranes in the town squares, supposedly to “move” them to warehouses, waiting for a crowd to gather, and then watching them drop the statue while the townspeople cheered and the crane operator said, “Oops, I dropped it!” Restoration of meaningful democracy. Return to what the Founding Fathers meant by democracy — reason over identity. Not birthright, but the right of intellect and of moral behavior. It is an answer to the Holocaust, an answer to slavery, an answer at some level to the war in the Congo.
I’m not saying this to get you to vote. It doesn’t matter to me whether you vote. What bothers me is that you don’t feel it. Obviously your vote won’t matter in the scheme of things. I’m just trying to explain why I can’t relate.
I know it is advertising, but the “Yes We Can” video still makes me cry. Because I feel so lucky to be living in one of those moments that is going to matter for the rest of the world. I grew up being told I could be president. B.S. I’m an atheist woman. I couldn’t even get elected at the county level. But if Obama can be president, someday an atheist woman can be president.
I feel freed into democracy by Obama’s candidacy, in a way my black brother does, too. And I feel he won’t forget me.
Maybe the weird irony is that you don’t get what it feels like because you’re a white guy, and so you don’t know what it is like to be stopped for driving while black or what it is like to live in fear of being raped while just going for a walk to the grocery store. But I think it is possible to be open to the oppression of history enough to get why it matters so much to pass this landmark with a man who is blackish (which is more amazing than even if he were just black) and intellectual.
I don’t believe that all of the white people who are canvassing for Obama are doing so merely out of liberal guilt. My experience is that a lot of them–Jewish, female, gay–feel as I do: That he is us, and we are with him.
xo,
Alice
Postscript:
I cannot resist here attaching some of what Obama said after he won South Carolina in the primaries, because this is what I’m talking about when I talk about him standing for everything I have ever worked for:
What we’ve seen in these last weeks is that we’re also up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign, but feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation.
It’s the politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon, a politics that tells us that we have to think, act and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us, the assumption that young people are apathetic, the assumption that Republicans won’t cross over, the assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor and that the poor don’t vote, the assumption that African-Americans can’t support the white candidate, whites can’t support the African-American candidate, blacks and Latinos cannot come together.
We are here tonight to say that that is not the America we believe in.
I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina. I saw South Carolina.
I saw crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children alike. I saw shuttered mills and homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from all walks of life and men and women of every color and creed who serve together and fight together and bleed together under the same proud flag.
I saw what America is and I believe in what this country can be. That is the country I see. That is the country you see. But now it is up to us to help the entire nation embrace this vision.
Because in the end, we’re not just against the ingrained and destructive habits of Washington, we’re also struggling with our own doubts, our own fears, our own cynicism.
The change we seek has always required great struggle and great sacrifice. And so this is a battle in our own hearts and minds about what kind of country we want and how hard we’re willing to work for it.
So let me remind you tonight that change will not be easy. Change will take time. There will be setbacks and false starts and sometimes we’ll make mistakes.
But as hard as it may seem, we cannot lose hope, because there are people all across this great nation who are counting on us, who can’t afford another four years without health care, that can’t afford another four years without good schools, that can’t afford another four years without decent wages because our leaders couldn’t come together and get it done.
This election is about the past vs. the future. It’s about whether we settle for the same divisions and distractions and drama that passes for politics today or whether we reach for a politics of common sense and innovation, a politics of shared sacrifice and shared prosperity.
There are those who will continue to tell us that we can’t do this, that we can’t have what we’re looking for, that we can’t have what we want, that we’re peddling false hopes. But here is what I know. I know that when people say we can’t overcome all the big money and influence in Washington, I think of that elderly woman who sent me a contribution the other day, an envelope that had a money order for $3.01 along with a verse of scripture tucked inside the envelope. So don’t tell us change isn’t possible. That woman knows change is possible.
When I hear the cynical talk that blacks and whites and Latinos can’t join together and work together, I’m reminded of the Latino brothers and sisters I organized with and stood with and fought with side by side for jobs and justice on the streets of Chicago. So don’t tell us change can’t happen.
When I hear that we’ll never overcome the racial divide in our politics, I think about that Republican woman who used to work for Strom Thurmond, who is now devoted to educating inner city-children and who went out into the streets of South Carolina and knocked on doors for this campaign. Don’t tell me we can’t change.
Yes, we can. Yes, we can change. Yes, we can.
Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can seize our future. And as we leave this great state with a new wind at our backs and we take this journey across this great country, a country we love, with the message we carry from the plains of Iowa to the hills of New Hampshire, from the Nevada desert to the South Carolina coast, the same message we had when we were up and when we were down, that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we will hope.
And where we are met with cynicism and doubt and fear and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of the American people in three simple words — yes, we can.