All in the Family: Love, Loyalty and Racism

All in the Family: Love, Loyalty and Racism

Today Senator Barack Obama gave a powerful speech to a small group of his supporters in Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love.” Unfortunately, the topic the Senator had to address was not about unity or compassion, but about racial division. He was there in Philadelphia to publicly repudiate some remarks made by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who had used what Obama termed “ incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation, and that rightly offend white and black alike.”

Yet even though Senator Obama unequivocally rejected the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, he did not reject the man. Instead he said, “As imperfect as he may be, [Jeremiah Wright] has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children.” Senator Obama said that he could no more reject the man, Jeremiah Wright, who had been like a father to him, than he could reject his white grandmother, “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Like many Americans, Barack Obama has a family he loves deeply, but whose members may well hold racist attitudes that do not accord with his own. And who among us has not had the same painful experience of hearing loved ones voice opinions at the dinner table that make us cringe, even as we debate whether or not to challenge them or to let things go in order to preserve family harmony or at least not to raise a long, painful, and ultimately fruitless subject of debate? We may not be able to convince them that their views of those with a different religion, or ethnicity, or skin color are wrong, but we cannot help but love them just the same.

I loved and respected my parents, but I recognized their racist attitudes even as a young child. It was brought home to me painfully one afternoon, when the son of our neighbor's black maid drove up beside me to ask if he had the right address for the home where his mother worked.

We all loved his mother, Rosa, who was one of the kindest, warmest human beings I ever knew. But here I was on the sidewalk confronted not just by a stranger, but by a black male stranger with a Southern accent I could barely understand. I took one look and all of my parents' underlying fears of blacks, particularly young black men in the late 60's took hold of my heart, and I fled like the devil was at my heels.

My mother was mortified and scolded me heartily in front of everyone- Rosa, her son, and our neighbors. But I looked at her and saw the fear and the hypocrisy written on her face. If this young man weren't Rosa's son, she would have fled at my heels just as fast.

In later years when I heard Mollie Ivins say, "Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything," I remembered that moment and realized I had found a kindred spirit.

At that moment as a young girl I started to question, if only in my head and my heart, what my parents said about Blacks, Asians, Jews, Catholics – just about anybody who didn't belong to the “right” group – German Lutherans (and even then they had to be “Missouri” Lutheran).

Yet I was also struck by the contradictions Senator Obama noted in his former pastor because they suggested the same contradictions I saw in my parents: “Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect," Senator Obama said of Jeremiah Wright. "He contains within him the contradictions — the good and the bad — of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.”

My parents also often treated individuals of different races, creeds, and ethnicities, far better then they talked about those groups in general. When the first black family moved in across the street from us in our modest home on the east side of Detroit, I trembled at how my mother would behave. But she walked across the street, welcomed them, and mentioned that she had been a school teacher and was available for tutoring if any child needed her. My father's funeral was attended by men he had worked with who were from other races and religions, even though he supported the candidacy of a man like Alabama Governor George Wallace because of his stands against integration of public schools.

It was as if my parents could kept two concepts of race simultaneously balanced in their minds and hearts-- their negative views of Blacks, Latinos, Jews etc. in general-- and the exceptions that they made for so many individuals in those groups whom they welcomed as colleagues and even friends.

It is for this reason that I sympathize with the dilemma of Senator Obama who will have to pay a political price for the snippets of Pastor Wright's sermons that get played over and over on YouTube.com and Fox Television.

But before Americans condemn Senator Obama for his loyalty to his former pastor, they should ask themselves: How many family dinner conversations would I be comfortable posting on YouTube.com? How many racist comments by family members have I let slide? Can we ever get past the issue of race without acknowledging that many of those we love and respect as individuals occasionally express views we would disavow, even though we could never reject them as members of our family?

If we begin to consider such questions honestly, we may have a chance of going into the 2008 presidential election without making a race a divisive issue but rather a fruitful one: an opportunity to address our past and our prejudices openly and without fear, no matter what the color of our skin.