My fellow Americans

I confessed on Facebook today that I'm proud to be an American for the first time. One friend who read my comment had much to say about it, and I deleted his comment because it clearly came from a place of his ignorance of why I felt that way, and I didn't care for the way he decided to ask me why I posted that status. The spirit of his argument is fair: In his opinion, there's much in American history to be proud of that doesn't have to do with Barack Obama. His list was pretty long, and I could explain in detail why each of those reasons had not inspired partiotism in me before today, but I don't feel the need to do so. What I do feel the need to do is explain why Obama's election made me weep.

I am a black woman raising a black son. And I'm not sure I can do justice to the fears and worries I sometimes have about being able to relate to him and the experiences he will have that I never did (his biracial ethnic make-up is fodder for another blog post). I taught high schoolers for two years, and more than once cried with a black teenage male whom I was trying to reason with who didn't understand why I was so much harder on him than on other kids. And I was - purposely - harder on my black male students, because I knew they would face struggles that no other demographic in my classroom would. Think what you want about that statement; I know it to be true because of my own experience and because of my students' home lives or lack thereof. It was extremely difficult to get those boys to believe me when I told them they had more career options than drug dealer or football player. And who was I? I was black, so they listened to me more than they would have if I was white, but I still wasn't a man. We were so alike, and yet I felt like I didn't quite reach them in the same way I reached my black girls. But, oh, if I had a classroom today and could look into each of their faces, hug them, and show them this huge, tangible example of what they can be when they shake off their jailed parents, drug dealer siblings, and project housing...

Well, faithful readers, I'm sporting an American flag lapel pin today because I know my former students, and my son, have hope.