With a title and picture like that I am pretty sure you can see where I am heading. I am even sure that you have read pieces with similar sentiments. But the fact is I think my journey there may be a little different than most.Last week two seemingly unrelated things happened that somehow pushed me down a strange path that helped this man’s soul connect with a bigger picture. Check this.
First, I was driving to work listening to a local gospel station when a commercial started. There I heard a passionate argument for why I would “need” to buy commemorative coins (shown above) honoring our first African-American president. For some reason, I couldn’t get that out of my head all day. Something irked about that 30-second sound bite, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
As I thought about it, I realized why I was annoyed. Since November the media has blitzed us with video & audio clips, stories, editorials, and pictures of our first “black” president. Don’t get me wrong; I get the historicity of the moment. As a man of non-white descent myself, I appreciate having a non-pigmently challenged man living in the White House. But the fact is and remains; he is not just African-American.
We (the media included) all understand the reality that Obama is half-white and half-Kenyan, raised for a time by an Indonesian step-father, and from then on reared by his white grandparents in Hawaii. But it doesn’t seem like the public wants to talk about or celebrate those facts. These facts reveal an incredible diversity that seem very reflective of today’s America. Yet, even with all this understanding we reduce a man because we are enamored with 50% of him.
A few days later the second event occurred and the gears in my mind shifted. One of my wife’s best friends went into premature labor. Their baby did not make it. Chloe Faith passed away 21 weeks into this thing called life.
As I have heard about how that family has tried to commemorate their daughter’s life and grieve their loss, I am humbled how little I understand. Death sobers one’s soul and forces you to look at life, whether you want to or not. So, even though I try to avoid totally getting lost in the self absorption of reflection, I fail miserably.
I begin to think through my kids and the time I have with them. I’ve tried to put myself in the place of that grieving family. As I do, I see that there are aspects of my children that I fail to recognize. One of them is reminiscent of the president’s plight.
You see my kids are like the president. They are bi-racial. Considering how they look, my daughter won’t ever be mistaken for a white girl, and my son may never be taken as an Indian. My wife can walk down the street with our daughter and people think she is the nanny not her mother. As humorous as that might be at times, when I think through the brevity of life this saddens me. The fact is even though our kids appear one way there is a whole aspect of their heritage that forms and shapes them that people may easily discard. I don’t want the beauty of my wife’s heritage to be slighted in my daughter’s eyes because people associate her with me simply due to the color of her skin. This also applies to my heritage in my son’s perspective.
Now I realize in light of the death of Chloe Faith, these simple thoughts seem trite. But I guess in some ways it feels safer for me right now to write about this than try and grapple more weighty things. So, thus I write all this to make one simple request. For the love, call the president something else. Call him bi-racial. Call him ethnically diverse. Call him pigmently well-endowed. But please, please, just don’t call the man black.
