Today, I rediscovered a simple truth about myself: I am at my best when I draw upon the emotions that drive me. I learned of those emotions during my college years, and grapple with them on the campaign trail as an intern in the Obama campaign.
As I've mentioned in an earlier post, I never knew what "race" was when I was growing up. This had as much to do with my parents' chronic inability to discuss and admit the importance of race to their lives, as it had to do with our socio-cultural context as Dominicans in the United States. After my years in poverty in the Dominican Republic as a toddler, and then years bouncing between poor American cities, I moved in with my father. An engineer, he was able to provide me with a middle-class upbringing, and with all the happy and unhappy consequences of growing up in our white suburbia. If his unyielding focus on academic excellence and sometimes harsh enforcement of scholastic discipline didn't shield me from the trappings of a racially unjust society, then perhaps my teachers' and mentors' relentless belief in me did. Whatever it was, it also prevented me from understanding the fundamental salience of race in America until my college years. I still have trouble qualifying it; I still don't know if it was a good thing: maybe it denied me a bitter perspective on race relations, and maybe it was just as well responsible for instilling in me my naive wistfulness for human unity and my foolish, lifelong desire for the racial integration of our society. But I do know that what followed my college epiphanies, in my socio-intellectual development and the expansion of my self-construct, is irretrievably linked to my fundamental belief that there has to be a way for humanity to solve its deepest of social problems--and the problem with itself.
I think we struggle, as a nation, with the fundamental nature of who we are as a people. As individuals we have many virtues, and there is no shortage of kindness in our aggregate nature. But in a larger sense, I believe we have a condition that is perhaps internal to humanity as a whole. As individuals that loathe themselves hit walls beyond which personal progress halts, so, too, does a society with deep intellectual fissures and self-disdain have difficulty reaching its potential. Deep down, I believe that we recognize our troubles for what they are. We know that far too many citizens go without healthcare, and that it is not always their fault. We realize that, 232 years after the nation's founding, far too few of us grow up with friends of a different race and that, save for the occasional diversity workshop in college, we seldom really experience racial integration, especially in our homes and neighborhoods. We know that it is wrong and unacceptable for so many children to grow up homeless or malnourished by either a lack of food or guidance or opportunities in their young lives. We know these to be true; they are self-evident, and I think we hate ourselves for it.
Whether it is this self-hatred that preempts a serious look at solutions to our problems, or a decentralized apathy--removed from guilt or even awareness--the result is as paralyzing to our progress as it is stunting to our growth; as deteriorating to our moral impulse for good as it is an affirmation that we are not only imperfect, but undisturbed at being so.
But I am a dreamer.
I believe that human beings are fundamentally good, if not always good at making decisions. We are inspired by greatness, if seldom called to it in our daily lives. I want to believe that we are capable of more readily recognizing the greater commonalities that bind us, than the smaller things that divide us, and I suspect that most of our divisions are less by desire than by design.
We have a problem with ourselves, but beyond the many that truly don't care to fix it, there are many others that are locked in such a struggle for survival that they never get the chance to even try. They never get the chance to fulfill their personal potential. I'm talking about the plumbers that could have been scientists if they'd had the chance to be; the lawyers that would rather have been peace corps activists had they not had social and familial pressures to "succeed" by modernity's standards; the doctors in private practice who would rather work in small towns and large cities to curb disease, but are instead trapped in Sallie Mae's debris. I'm talking about all the human beings around the planet for whose intelligence OLPC and UNICEF food drops will never do justice, because the larger sociological infrastructure is not in place to support the contributions they might otherwise make to the world.
We cheat ourselves of our best and most brilliant minds by reserving our resources for those of us who've been selected by time to be its master storyteller. But, more importantly, we deny ourselves the highest of Maslow's terraces, from which we might so collectively look in pride at what we've made for the world.
These are the sorts of things that have haunted me since my college days, since just before my transformational understanding of what it is that I believe humans are capable of, and since the moment that I realized I had a talent--imbued with passion--borne out of those emotions that I still grapple with, and of which which I am reminded of through my work for the Obama campaign.
Three years ago, I finished my college days believing that I'd found the recipe for social progress. It was a simple proposition: if all I had was a single fulcrum of change, I could devote my life to finding the ideal location for it, where would I place it? What policy; what agenda; what sociopolitical initiative would most forcefully cascade into the many other social problems we face in our cities, in our towns, in our communities and neighborhoods?
You may have your own answer, but for me, it was education.
I believed that if we could significantly redefine our attention to and our investment in the education of our world's children, then the canvass of our problems would eventually grow ever smaller, as more and more people grew up with the potential to turn their intellectual assets in the direction of solutions for humanity. Sure, new problems arise as the result of change and innovation. We now lie, for example, at the crosshairs of environmental implosion, on the heels of our technological and industrial progress as a nation. But I believe that if you build up an infrastructure; that if you plan far into the future and surround yourself with the right people and the right tools before you need them, then new problems become manageable, because you are equipped to easily invent tailored solutions to those new problems. For me, what that looks like is a highly educated, culturally and racially integrated society, based on justice and access to opportunities; where new threats are expunged and calamities are averted because the society has everything it needs to adapt to new demands.
This vision isn't a utopia. To me, it is the natural result of a world in which the people come before the objects in it, where humans are treated as our greatest assets and most valued investments. Out of that comes a stability—an adaptable, global self-efficacy—that secures higher standards of living, lower mortality rates; a greater sense of fairness, a fundamental respect of freedom, and a stronger moral fiber at more than just the individual level; a transformation of us all into super-people, because we shed our dependence on the giant few in exchange for the chance to become our very own heroes.
Perhaps my vision is too wide. But I believe that there has to be a way. I heard, once, from a collage dean, that education "functions to demystify the world and devictimize the people in it." When people understand their world and can share that understanding with each other, they are able to stand up against the abuses and injustices in their world. With knowledge no longer held by a minority, they all become equals.
I don’t know if Barack Obama has the power, or even the desire, to help realize the promise of the human story I have laid out. I do believe he wants to help make the world a less tragic place. He is my first hero: the first human being I genuinely consider above “role model”, and, regrettably, the only human being who, by the mere excellence of his existence, has called into doubt my confidence in my ability to bring change to the world. Perhaps only a biracial man can cross the divide of racial disunity that still haunts us, which is why I cried when I watched his Democratic Convention acceptance speech, myself a lone black man in a crowd of white supporters inside a Park City, Utah bar. I sometimes cry after a long, unpaid twelve-hour day at my Obama Headquarters, a day filled with people that genuinely care about this black man; this white man. They care about the future of this country just as much as he and I do, and they throw their very beings behind his dreams. Mostly, I cry because I know that as a people, we are close to turning to a new and better page of the human story. And I cry because I wonder if I—like this lovely man—will one day change the world with my ideas.
Perhaps, one day, somebody else will cry at what I have accomplished.
And, perhaps, much further on ahead in the pages of human history, no one will ever have to.
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