Continuing the race conversation: Part white, part nonwhite, all me

[COMMENTARY]  Since the dust-up began about race and Barack Obama, I’ve thought a lot about the movie “Bulworth.” Warren Beatty plays a jaded politician who sheds the scales over his eyes and begins to truly understand the challenge of race in America. His character Bulworth says:

But we got Americans with families that can’t even buy a meal
Ask a brother who’s been downsized if he’s getting any deal
Or a white boy bustin’ ass ’til they put him in his grave
He ain’t gotta be a black boy to be livin’ like a slave
Rich people have always stayed on top by dividing white people from colored people
but white people got more in common with colored people then they do with rich people
we just gotta eliminate them.
White people, black people, brown people, yellow people, get rid of ‘em all
All we need is a voluntary, free spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction
Everybody just gotta keep f——’ everybody ’til they’re all the same color

Many Americans have already participated in “procreative racial deconstruction” — like my own family.

I am a person of mixed race, teased incessantly as a kid for being something other than white and ignored by kids of nonwhite groups for being too white. I wasn’t able to talk with either group about their bigotry against each other, let alone against people like me. In spite of the awkward pressures that forced him to do so, it was an enormous relief to me to hear someone of mixed race like Barack Obama talk openly about race.

Continued -It’s taken the weight of decades off my shoulders to hear him talk about the responsibilities we all share in this dialogue. Other celebrities have dealt with this challenge — like Tiger Woods, proving by action alone that he will not be defined by others’ bigotry — but Obama has been able to do so in a manner that encouraged more deliberative conversation about our biases.

There are other issues that folks don’t want to talk about in addition to race. I have family members both white and nonwhite who are uncomfortable not only with persons of other races and ethnicities, but with gays. In addition to using racial epithets, they’ve made comments about “the gay agenda,” as if it were some sort of secret, strategic doomsday plan against the foundation of humankind.

Yet the same people who express fear about the “gay agenda” may be very close to “the girls next door” or the long-unmarried uncle for whom they’ll bend over backward to help or invite to holiday gatherings. They honestly have no clue their neighbors or family members are gay and in a loving, committed relationship, or that the so-called “gay agenda” is merely to be allowed to live in peace like all other human beings.

They don’t seem to realize that all human beings, regardless of race or ethnic origin, subscribe to a similar agenda, acting as if this applies only to that singular nice person who works with them but not to an entire group of people to whom that nice person belongs, or overlapping subsets of people containing people like me.

What else are my family members not seeing? Is their blindness deliberate, adopted to allow them to function in a way that is in contravention of their belief system? I don’t know; I’m not certain when I’ll be able to get up the intestinal fortitude to simply ask them, knowing that I risk disturbing the peace between them and their gay or white/nonwhite neighbors in doing so. How do I broach the subject without potentially throwing a monkey wrench in this delicately woven truce between their awareness and their stated beliefs?

Straddling the line between races and ethnicities shapes and informs me; I can relate to Obama in no small way. Just because one’s family is bigoted — whether against persons of different race or different orientations — doesn’t mean you can deny where you came from, doesn’t mean you’ll automatically hate them. They’re your flesh and blood, the voice in your head that nags you to do the right thing.

But acknowledging this is only part of the process of growth. How do we integrate our conflicts with our own family and their belief systems in a healthy way so that we can get on with our lives and personal goals? How do we move forward as one family, one nation?

I wish I had an answer. It is increasingly difficult to explain this to my own kids, who are blonder yet than I am, but who still have the brown eyes of their nonwhite ancestors. They too see and recognize familial biases, often asking me why this, why that about these incongruities between values and actions — but just as unable to talk about them with other family members as I am, sustaining that missing conversation across another generation.

Last summer vacation we worked together on learning about the Constitution, from the preamble through the amendments. My kids recognized from their reading assignments the reference in Obama’s speech on race to the ideal of a “more perfect union” — but I cannot point to anything yet more perfect save for their innocent and trusting acceptance that we work toward a unified nation in spite of our biases and blindness, and that we’ll eventually talk this all out.

What about you? What’s your story about race? Share it here in comments or e-mail us at michiganmessenger AT gmail.com.

Photo: Barack Obama and his grandparents, via AFP.