"All Men Are Created Equal," Wrote A Slave Owner

There was an interesting discussion Wednesday on NPR's Talk Of The Nation, looking at the African-American experience and its effects upon black views of patriotism. This conversation was spurred by Michelle Obama's comments earlier this year concerning her feelings about her country, and the negative (and often over-the-top and oblivious) reaction to those comments.

In the end, of course, this is about the great elephant in the American living room: Our inability, even now, to reasonably reconcile the nation's racial history with what we'd like to believe about ourselves. An awfully large number of the white folk that I know want nothing more than to believe that it's all in the past, that the page has turned and we have entered into a "post-racial" era. That that was then, this is now, and nothing more need be said.

But pretending that there is no problem is not the same thing as finding some solution to the problem -- and there clearly is still a problem, judging by black poverty and incarceration statistics, among many other things.

And so Wednesday I found myself driving across Northeastern Iowa, listening to this thoughtful discussion, thinking very soberly about race in America, and occasionally wiping tears from the corners of my eyes. And, most of all, wondering what I can do. In the end, after all, I'm just an ordinary guy, without power or position.

Compounding my feeling of helplessness is my own family history. My father's family, according to my wife's genealogical efforts, appears to have lived in the antebellum South (though it's unclear whether it was in any way connected to slave ownership or trade), and I am told that my paternal grandfather was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. How does one even begin to make up for such a background?

I decided, trite though it may seem, that one can merely do what one can do. I cannot change the past. But I can change my own reality here in the present, in the hope that it will positively impact the future. I can work to improve myself, to recognize and eradicate the small prejudices that I might still harbor. I can continue trying to raise my children to see persons for who they are, not what they are. I can have the courage speak up when I see injustice, and to confront those who are unenlightened or cynical enough to use race divisively. I can support policies and politicians that work toward a more just society.

And, perhaps most importantly (and most difficult in these times), I can keep my faith. I can believe that we, as a nation, will continue to move forward, toward the society that we want to be. That I want us to be. That we can be, if we dare.