Barack Obama never lived in Kansas. I moved away nearly 40 years ago. I know I’ve carried with me the ideas I learned from my Kansas relatives, and suspect Obama has, too. These aren’t "white" ideas, or even "Kansas" ideas. They are American ideas. As people reflect on the historic nature of Obama’s election, some may point to his African-American heritage as a reason for celebration. I do. But I also know that he shares with me, and many Americans, values and hopes that come from a place where color is irrelevant and geography unimportant.
All the same, I feel especially confident in his abilities, knowing he was raised by women from Kansas.
I couldn’t be more WASPy, eligible for membership in the DAR and Daughters of the 1812. And, at the age of 56, I should be part of the demographic most people assigned to Hillary Clinton—an old(ish) white woman. But from the start of Obama’s campaign, I was drawn to qualities in him, to ideas and the way he expressed them. I heard something deeply and appealingly familiar.
For months, I couldn’t put my finger on what that something was. My husband, like me a transplant from the Midwest, heard it. My uncle, once from Kansas and now a resident of Pennsylvania, wrote in an email, "He sounds like Lincoln—his words, the cadence—don’t you think?" Only when news came of the death of Obama’s grandmother did I realize what I was hearing: it was the language of my Midwestern family and the ideas deeply rooted in the gentle, rolling hills of eastern Kansas.
His grandmother and my mother, nearly the same age, both grew up in and around Wichita, Kansas. Both had lived through the Depression as girls. Both would turn their talents to the war effort as young women. And both, it seems, transferred to their families the inter-connected ideas of opportunity and personal responsibility, a belief in social justice expressed simply as being good to your neighbor, and a practical way of living life. "Your grandfather always said," my mother would remind me, "It’s not the hand you’re dealt, it’s how you play the game."
Part of that game in Kansas, during the lives of his grandmother, his mother, my mother and me, was racism. When I wanted to go swimming in the local pool, on hot summer days, my parents said no. "They won’t let blacks swim there, so we won’t swim there either." We had books in our home that let us imagine a time when race wouldn’t matter. A children’s book, and one of my favorites, featured the emerging friendship of a black and a white boy, demonstrating the power of children to overcome the racism practiced by adults. Fun for Chris is still in my library, and still a cherished book.
Barack Obama never lived in Kansas. I moved away nearly 40 years ago. I know I’ve carried with me the ideas I learned from my Kansas relatives, and suspect Obama has, too. These aren’t "white" ideas, or even "Kansas" ideas. They are American ideas. As people reflect on the historic nature of Obama’s election, some may point to his African-American heritage as a reason for celebration. I do. But I also know that he shares with me, and many Americans, values and hopes that come from a place where color is irrelevant and geography unimportant.
All the same, I feel especially confident in his abilities, knowing he was raised by women from Kansas.