Getting Personal About Obama’s Election

I had to think about this for a day or so, but I decided that in addition to what I’ve written about this election and what it means for race relations, employment law and the workplace, I needed to write something personal. It seems to me that it’s a mistake not to take a historic election personally.

I grew up when blacks and whites were separated by an invisible barrier. Public schools in my small community weren’t integrated until the year after my senior year in high school. Blacks entered our local movie theater through the colored entrance and sat in the balcony. I had little interaction with blacks, but two incidents where I did have contact are etched in my memory.

When I was in the first or second grade, my parents employed a black maid, not because we were people of means (we lived in a rented house at the time), but because my mother’s health prevented her from doing around the house what she was accustomed to doing. During the year or so that Dora worked at our home two or three days a week until my mother got well, she became like a member of the family. She took care of us kids, shopped, cooked, washed, ironed, and did whatever she was asked to do. She was funny and enjoyed laughter.

One day, I was walking around the corner on the way to our house when I met Dora who was headed to the same place. As we approached the house, she left the sidewalk and seemed to begin walking toward the side of the house. I quickly grabbed her hand, pulled her back onto the sidewalk and led her into the house through the front door. Later that day, my mother pulled me aside and told me that I shouldn’t have done that — that Dora should use the back door. When I asked why, my mother said the neighbors might talk.

A few years later when I was in junior high, my dad would sometimes hire a black man, Mr. Lyle, to help him with carpentry work around the house (a different house that we now owned). He had a son around my age, and he brought his son, Ben, with him one day. I was big into baseball at the time and invited Ben to pitch with me. I retrieved two gloves and a ball, and we began pitching in the front yard. My mother called me inside and told me to move to the back yard. When I asked why, she said the neighbors might talk.

This was part of my introduction to the social norms that governed the relationship between blacks and whites then. I would like to believe that one reason I remember these two incidents so vividly is I knew something was wrong, or at least weird, about these norms. I would be less than honest, however, if I didn’t acknowledge that these norms inculcated a legitimacy to the racial separation surrounding my youth, making it impossible to discover that blacks and whites were much more alike than different. It took the Civil Rights Movement to hold these norms up for what they were.

A lot has changed since those days. I work with blacks. I have black friends. Practicing labor and employment law for almost an entire career has placed me in contact with blacks and members of other ethnic groups — perhaps more than any other area of the law would have. But the past is hard to fully escape — for blacks and whites. When groups of employees or students or organization members are milling around together in one place — maybe a big room — it’s still not uncommon to see mostly blacks in one part of the room and mostly whites in another part of the room. The vestige of separation is still with us.

As historic as Obama’s election is, I don’t believe for a second that we’ve finally solved our race problems. As long as a certain percentage of whites can’t vote for a black person and as long as at least 90% of blacks vote for a person because he’s black, we’ve still got race problems. The truth, of course, is that Obama is both black and white. He can’t separate one from the other.

Obama’s election is a step toward racial harmony, but there are many more steps to be taken, I suspect over many more years, decades. That’s discouraging, until you think about the racial and ethnic divides existing in countries around the world — divides so deep and held so long that unspeakable brutality is committed by one group toward another year after year. These divides aren’t only between blacks and whites but between different white ethnic groups (in Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, for example) and different black ethnic groups (in Rwanda and Darfur, for example). Maybe, we’re further along than we think.

If you didn’t watch both Obama’s and McCain’s speeches on the night of November 4, go to YouTube and pull them up. Both were conciliatory and inspiring. Both seemed designed to heal racial, as well as, political wounds. Both of them made me proud to live in America, a still flawed but great country, where something as remarkable as the election of a one man melting pot to the presidency could occur in my lifetime.

Barack Obama can make a difference in race relations during the next four years, but if we think we can leave it up to him alone, we’ll make little progress at all. (Indeed, the economic crisis that now besets us will likely consume all his time and energy for a while.) All of us must do our part to make a positive difference. I will continue to defend employers against unfounded race discrimination charges (and race discrimination charges are sometimes unfounded), and I will continue to work with employers to make their workplaces discrimination-free zones. I can’t completely shed my racial past, but I can use it to make the future of race relations a little better. Every workplace has the potential to be a great laboratory for learning how good, everyday race relations can occur.

Though I don’t agree with Obama on all the issues (I don’t agree with anyone on all the issues), I appreciate the fact that his campaign and election have stirred old memories to remind me how far we’ve come, to teach me how far we still have to go, and to give me hope that one day we’ll get there.

1. 

   LKS says:

   November 6, 2008 at 10:00 am

   Growing up out West in the 70′s, then moving to the South as a teenager – I got the chance to see the vast difference between race relations in two distinct areas of the country.

   Sadly, those differences still exist.
   Hopefully the next few years will help to close that gap.
2. 

   ACU Frank says:

   November 6, 2008 at 12:22 pm

   There’s a guy in my church who has what must be the world’s largest collection of confederate flag t-shirts… and he wears one every Sunday morning. When I got to the polls Tuesday morning, his truck was already there. Sure enough, he was at the head of the line, in his best Johnny Reb T.

   No, I didn’t ask who got his vote.
3. 

   Lucy says:

   November 6, 2008 at 1:47 pm

   As a girl in elematary school, I didn’t see a differance in color,in fact my mom would get after me because several girls and myself would walk home from school all hugging one another. My mom would tell me that she couldn’t find me among all of the black girls, they were some of my best friends. I found out that black people had to go into a restaurant through the back door and eat in the back room when I was 16 years old, then shortly after that they started coming in like everyone else. My best friend Juanita (who was black and now deceased) was one of my best friends even as an adult. My mom never told me to not bring them over and I think it all carries over from how we bring up our children. To this day, I don’t see a color difference, we are all God’s children.
4. 

   Nae says:

   November 6, 2008 at 6:04 pm

   When I was a child living in California in the early 60′s, my mom told me not to tell people where we were from (Oklahoma). She thought they might assume we had issues with blacks. The only other thing I remember was her making us change a childhood game because it used the N word. We had no idea what it meant and substituted ‘teddy bear’ quite happily.
   I never noticed that people of color didn’t live where we lived until I was 18 and doing door to door sales. A pretty black woman opened her door to me and I was suddenly struck dumb. I was stunned to realize that though I believed segregation and prejudice was wrong, I had never actually come face to face and talked with a person of color. I was shocked and ashamed.
   I am happy to report that later I met many people of all kinds of backgrounds. An African-American was one of my bridesmaids in 1977. Sometimes it is not enough to just accept that we are all equal. Sometimes you need to reach and let your actions speak for you.
5. 

   John Phillips says:

   November 7, 2008 at 5:45 pm

   Thanks to all of you for sharing some personal stories. They have helped me reflect further on the meaning of all this.

   JOhn