What's Race Gotta Do With It? – November 2008

My fifteen-year-old son doesn't like to hear of my doubts about president-elect Barack Obama. He just wants for once in his young life to feel good about his president and his country. But had I been among that Grant Park Chicago crowd at Barack Obama's election-night victory speech when he announced, "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible . . . ," courage would have required me to have raised my hand as one of the "doubters."

But I was not in the crowd that night. Instead I was home with my partner, our teenaged kids, along with the "he's-not-my-boyfriend" boyfriend of the elder teen. We had arrived back in the house just in time, ordering pizza en route, to arrive in front of the TV set as voting sites closed across California.

Initially, we had tried to find a "crowd" with which to celebrate Obama's election, but our brief trip to a gathering at an art center in San Francisco ended abruptly. Upon entering the center, two giant screens displayed the CNN coverage of the elections and our son immediately gravitated to one. Once the rest of us found our seats, however, the other screen began to display a series of colorful images of unspecified "Third World" peoples performing various ceremonial rituals. Especially astute in manners of cultural appropriation, my partner, Linda, whispers into my ear impassively, "What does this have to do with the election?"

Nothing as far as I could tell, but this was a Bay Area artists' celebration, which implied "partying" could mean anything. That night it urged the crowd of artists and arts aficionados to join a ritualized circle dance. Lakota drum at its center, dozens of (mostly white) people joined the circle, bouncing up and down to a quasi-American Indian rhythm, some yelping out in a manner I imagined an untrained ear might consider primal. And with that, my family and I rose from our seats and left.

"Consciousness spoils your time," I always say to my students; but none of us were having a good time that night, including our kids who by now are used to these sudden conscienced departures from public events. Even they, certainly old enough to begin to cultivate their own political views, were uncomfortable with the circle dance because as Chicanos they were raised to know what Indian is and what it is not.

So, an hour later, we are back home in Oakland performing our own ritual of pizza and watching the election results on the tube. (Yes, we still have a television with a tube.) I am not eating pizza, as I am on the second day of a fast in solidarity with the "Fast for the Future" protesters down in La Placita in Los Angeles.²

"Good. More for me," my son says irreverently, grabbing another slice from the box. He loves it, just a little, that fifteen-year-old boy rebellion against his mother's politics. Then the moment we had been waiting for arrives, the announcement that Obama had secured enough electoral votes to win the election, as the landslide figures come tumbling in. The kids are ecstatic, although the nineteen-year-old girl shows more reserve in front of the "not-boyfriend," her feet snuggled under him on the couch. I get a call from, first, my sister and then my Dad, but it's my Dad's words that hit me. "I haven't seen anything like this since 1940 and FDR's landslide." This depression-era Democrat hasn't been this optimistic in sixty-eight years, I think, with a brief reprieve in 1960 with the election of John F. Kennedy.

"Happy days are here again."

Hearing Obama's words in our living room—[If there is anyone out there] "who still questions the power of our democracy"—the most "doubt" I visibly express is the side-long glance I give to Linda, who rolls her ever-critical eyes into her forehead...