Today, as we stand in the twilight of 2016 and Obama’s presidency, and we stare into the dark, soul-sucking abyss of white patriarchy politically reasserting itself, I feel the need to tell you about my children.
My son turned eleven years old this summer. He was three when Barack Obama came into office. I voted for Obama both times he was up for election, even though I grew up in an incredibly conservative Southern family, and the only election I’d ever voted in before Obama, I voted Republican. In 2008 as I watched the election unfold, I felt a transcendental moral calling to vote for Obama regardless of his political party - because years earlier, although I came from a wildly racist family in the deepest depths of the Deep South, my mother had broken social ranks. When I was growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, my mother made sure we kept in touch with our gay relatives, even though our extended family shunned them. We invited black friends to our house for sleepovers, even as my aunts and uncles spoon-fed my cousins lessons about “bluejays that don’t mix with cardinals.”
I am so grateful that my two children live in a world where they have never known anything but a black president. That is normal to them - that is right. It’s the way things can and should be. The idea of a white man as president is foreign to my kids, as foreign as the idea of a black president was to my own 11-year-old self in the late 1980s.
Now more than ever, representation matters. Not just politically, but in our media.
Both of my children have spent their formative years with a black First Family, and watching television shows chock full of diverse casts. They see black women as heroes, and latino men as role models. They have multiple friends at school with two moms or two dads, and nobody says a peep about it because this is normal to them.
The other day during The Flash, a cosmetics commercial featuring a transgender model aired. My son hit pause to ask me about it, and we talked about transgender people the same way my mother talked to me about non-white and lgbt people in the 1980s and 1990s: These are our friends. This is normal. They are us, and we are them. I love you, and this is a safe space to share your questions and feelings.
It’s important that you know that so many children in America have been raised with the understanding that a black president is normal, and a white president is unnatural and foreign. As a country we are moving – sometimes the progress is agonizingly slow. But we are moving, and changing, and growing.
More than anything else, as a woman in my late 30s with a family and kids, I’m sorry it isn’t happening faster. My kids deserve more. Every single one of you deserves more, and I am so, so sorry. I am wildly desperate for more for our country. I am raising my children to demand more. A week after this election, tears still literally run down my cheeks as I type this, because my 8-year-old daughter deserved to see the first female president give an acceptance speech last Wednesday. She deserved it; we all did.
But it’s also so important that you know that my 70-year-old mother still voted for Hillary Clinton, in the sea of racist Trump-supporting Southern white folk she has always been a part of and stood apart from. I would never try to to excuse the horrible choices of my extended family, but I need you to know that my mother, raised in a racist hellhole, chose to step away and raise her own two socially aware daughters because she wanted more for us and for her country. We have both embraced that choice of hers, and kept marching forward from the new starting block she created for us, making our own progress with the generation that comes after.
There is hope. This was not our year, but all is not lost.
Please keep creating. Keep creating media for my children that represents the America we are and should be, because I make sure that my little ones are watching. Sometimes parents like me talk with them about it; but sometimes other people’s children watch it alone and feel understood even when their parents reject who they are, and what they are. They need you. We all need you.
Our children deserve to grow up in a radically more understanding, more accepting place than we stand today. As a parent raising young children, I appreciate you, and the work that you are doing. I make sure my little ones see it.
YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE.
