November 3, 2006 - My granddaughter Alexis graduates from high school in June 2008.  She is beautiful, talented, athletic, intelligent, and wise beyond her years.  She is trying to choose between colleges, torn between taking an athletic scholarship from a college in the top tier of women’s soccer and an academic scholarship to an Ivy League university – namely Yale.  It does not seem to faze her when I remind her that President Bush was a Yale graduate.

2008 will be a landmark in her life.  That is something that she shares with Barack Obama.

There is another attribute that she shares with Senator Obama.  She is an American and strangers refer to her as African-American.  I was recently interviewed in a man-on-the-street segment of a Chicago network news cast.  The interview was about politics and the subject focused on was Senator Osama’s political future.  I was asked what I thought of the possibility that he will run in 2008.  I replied that I was sure of it.  Asked if I thought that people would be reluctant to vote for an African American I replied that I did not think so.  “Why?” the interviewer asked. “Because he is Barack Obama” was my reply.

There are always things that you wish you had said and this was no exception.  I should have said that Senator Obama was not an “African – American”.  I should have said he is simply an American whose father happened to be born in Kenya.  He is as American as the Kansas plains; as much a British-American as anything else.  My granddaughter’s father has never seen Africa and neither have his ancestors as far back as there are records. He is the great grandson of slaves; born like my daughter in a hospital in our college town. She and her brother are as American as the Illinois prairie.  They have more Scots in their lineage than anything else.  Alexis and Jordan are simply Americans and so is Barack Obama. 

There will always be those whose minds are so small that when they look at Senator Obama or at Alexis will see only the color of their skins.  There will always be those whose grasp on their own identity is so tenuous that they will apply every adverse stereotype to Alexis, Jordan, and Barack Obama just as there will always be people who can see beyond their complexions to appreciate their ability to contribute to our shared tomorrows.

America is not hyphenated.  As the Senator said, “There are no Blue States and Red States. There is only the United States.”  I wish it were true.  But in this season of partisan attacks I see that it is not.  There are still those who will cling to the falsehoods of stereotypes and use them to bloody their adversaries as in the infamous ad in Tennessee.  I can only hope that we will finally come to the maturity as a people to be able to see only Americans when we look at a crowd and value as we view an individual.