What the Inauguration Means to Me
January 12th, 2009Last week I learned of an essay contest where one could win tickets to the Inaugural activities by writing an essay about what the inauguration means to them. Here is my submission:
When my son was born, on January 20, 1987, I had no idea that by the time he was old enough to vote in his first Presidential election that he would have the opportunity to pull the lever for another biracial man. It didn’t seem possible twenty-two years ago, that the world my husband and I envisioned for our children’s future would include a president that represented their experience in the United States of America.
My husband was born in the South, in 1941. Though it would be five months before the United States officially declared war on Japan and entered WWII, African-Americans had been virtual prisoners of war, struggling for their freedoms in this country for well over 300 years. No one, in 1941, would have looked at this beautiful, black, bouncing, baby boy and whispered to him, “You can become the President when you grow up.” Not in 1941. Not in 1951, at the age of ten, when most children are told they can do anything, be anything. Not even in 1961, at age twenty, as John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, was there a hint of hope for a black man to be President. As the decades rolled by, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001, my husband at age 30, 40, 50 and even 60, didn’t really believe he would see the day that an African-American could be elected the President of the United States of America.
Fast forward to 1966, when a blond haired, blue-eyed baby girl is born in Pennsylvania, far from the race riots of Atlanta and the war raging in Vietnam. She is born with the privilege that her color can buy in America, and though no one tells her that she can be President, because she is, of course, a girl, she is encouraged from day one to be all she can be. She inhabits a different world than the black baby boy born in 1941, who lives only an hour’s drive from the baby girl, but yet, is light years away.
Jump ahead to 1986, when the blond baby girl, now twenty, falls in love with the black baby boy, now forty-five. They are told by everyone that their love isn’t real, that their relationship is impossible and asked; by everyone they know, both black and white,
“But what about the children?”
It is now 2009. We’ve been happily married for over two decades. We have a beautiful baby boy, who will turn twenty-two on Barack Obama’s Inauguration day, and our own bouncing baby girl, now age fourteen. On January 20, 2009, I can honestly tell those doubters and naysayers, who asked, “But what about the children?” what I have known in my heart, all along. Our biracial son, and daughter, can be whatever they want to be, including; the President of the United States of America.