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Friday, Jul. 04, 2008

Patriots love their country in spite of its flaws

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Patriots love their country in spite of its flaws

Once again, some political pundits have turned their attention to one of the most pressing issues of this presidential campaign. It’s not the skyrocketing price of oil or the housing slump, but whether Michelle Obama is a true patriot.

In a moment of joy as her husband moved closer to winning the Democratic nomination, Obama said, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”

That Americans want to know more about her as a potential first lady is understandable. And yet, I find the questions about her love of country disappointing.

When I see Michelle Obama — the product of two African-American parents who grew up on the South Side of Chicago — I see a part of myself and all of the African-American people in my life, whose duality as a black person and a proud American is often misunderstood.

To be an African-American in the United States is to exist in two worlds: one steeped in black culture and tradition and shaped in part by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and the other rooted in the larger American mainstream in which you live, work and play but still strive to be seen as more than just the “black neighbor,” “black lawyer” or “black athlete.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, an African-American author and civil-rights activist, captured this sentiment best when he wrote in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,’’ that for African-Americans “one ever feels his two-ness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.’’

Like Obama, I grew up in an urban environment, in the city of Detroit.

My father is not a college graduate. He enlisted in a segregated Army in the early 1950s, then supported our family as a foreman on the swing shift at a Ford Motor Co. steel plant, much like Obama’s father did working at a water purification plant in Chicago.

My father and my mother, a homemaker and later a counselor for Detroit public schools, emphasized education as a way to a better life and taught my four siblings and me a strong work ethic, the same inherently American values that were a part of Obama’s upbringing. Despite our middle-class lifestyle, my parents held a somewhat skeptical view of what their children could accomplish (and what they would face later as adults) in the world outside the comfort zone that was our mostly African-American neighborhood and community.

It was their past that very much influenced their lives.

My parents are descendants of slaves and were exposed to racism as children and adults. They often came face to face with racial strife in the 1950s and ’60s, when seeing an African-American run for the highest office in the land was as far-fetched as a NASA mission to Pluto.

Five years before I was born, National Guard tanks rolled down the alley behind our home, responding to the Detroit Riot of 1967, the result of years of economic inequality and police abuse.

When my parents moved into a more integrated neighborhood shortly before my birth, a white neighbor showed up on their doorstep to complain to my mother that “now, because of you, I have to move.” Fortunately, as a child in the 1970s and ’80s, I experienced none of this overt racism. I was wrapped in the cocoon of familiarity, attending mostly black private and public schools. My world consisted of the three or so blocks in my neighborhood. Our family ventured to the suburbs mostly to shop, participate in the occasional family outing, or visit relatives and friends who had migrated out of the city. It was against this backdrop that I entered college in 1990 at the University of Missouri-Columbia. There, I became aware of what it meant to be one of a few people of color.

At Mizzou, I was one of several hundred African-American students out of about 26,000. I was shocked my first week when a melee erupted just off campus. In the frenzy of a drunken bash, members of a white fraternity fought with some black youths from the town, injuring a local black high school student. African-American students and leaders organized a demonstration during the homecoming parade, seeking to raise awareness and bring about healing on a campus where white and black students sat together in lecture hall but rarely socialized outside the classroom. Other smaller incidents over the years would reinforce the alienation that classmates of color felt on campus.

Yet I and other African-American colleagues, family and friends have refused to give up hope that bridges could be built and ignorance could be overcome with mutual understanding and respect.

Much has changed in America since my parents’ coming of age in the 1950s, and even in the time since I graduated from college 14 years ago. I believe that we are becoming a nation where most people judge others by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

In the 10 years since my husband and I moved to California, we certainly have been welcomed warmly and openly by almost everyone we meet. This is especially true in San Luis Obispo County, where we’ve made our permanent home.

Still, I’m ever mindful that moving forward as a society means acknowledging painful parts of our past.

That’s what I find so troubling about the repeated questions about Obama’s patriotism; that 44 years after the Civil Rights Act, there are those who either are uneducated about or choose to dismiss the reality that racial divisions have been a factor in this nation’s history, and that it is possible to gleam with pride in America without ignoring the skeletons in the closet.

As I see it, Obama is proud of America, a country where she, her parents, her husband and so many other people of color have found opportunity and accomplished what their forefathers and mothers could only imagine even a few decades ago.

It’s this excitement and possibility that the people of this country could make history by electing a president based on what he represents, not his ethnic background (or in the case of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, her gender), that has been remarkable.

African-Americans fought and shed blood for the U.S., helped build it, tilled its fertile lands and embraced America, even when others didn’t always reciprocate. To lift your country up, even in the struggle for equality and justice, may truly be one of the greatest expressions of patriotism.