America’s healing can begin with family around the holidays

By Ben Jealous

Ben jealous

With the holidays approaching, it seems like our country couldn’t be more divided. This divide has been perhaps the most important overarching theme of our national conversation in recent years. And it has taken root in many of our own families.

Blood may be thicker than water, but for many American families it doesn’t seem to be as thick as politics. Or, if not politics specifically, then the cultural divides that have widened and flared up in our political debate.

Perhaps our national healing can begin with our families around the holiday table.

My own family has different views, just like millions of American families. And in my family there are stories of division and stories of healing.

My paternal family’s roots in America stretch back 400 years to Massachusetts – home of the first Thanksgiving. My mother’s family has also lived here for almost 400 years, although in Virginia and Maryland, dating back to the area’s first white settlers and their African slaves.

When my parents fell in love and married as young civil rights activists in Baltimore, their marriage was illegal in Maryland. Their relationship was taboo back then. My father’s family disowned him for marrying a black woman and he lost his inheritance.

So I grew up on America’s racial fault line. And learning about my own family’s history has given me important insight into the nature of division both within the family itself and in the country—our big, messy American family.

By using DNA research to trace my own family’s origins, I discovered that, like President Barack Obama, I am a distant cousin of former Vice President Dick Cheney. This revelation was interesting. But the realization that I am also a distant cousin of Robert E. Lee was a little harder to bear. I was the youngest national president of the NAACP ever. He was the Confederate general who essentially fought to preserve slavery.

The Civil War itself was a conflict that was known to divide families. “Brother against brother” is a phrase often used to describe the divisions that have arisen in many American families, particularly in border states like my home state of Maryland.

And after the Civil War, America’s divisions certainly did not disappear. But there are also inspiring stories of coming together that simply haven’t been told as often as the stories of division and oppression.

My grandmother’s grandfather was at the center of one of these stories. In the years immediately following Reconstruction, Edward David Bland—who was born into slavery—led Virginia’s black Republicans into a coalition with former white Confederate soldiers to form a third party that took over Virginia state government.

How many of us grew up with the experience of freedmen and the same Confederates who fought to enslave them actually coming together to form a winning political party based on a shared desire to save their state’s public schools?

The bipartisan, multiethnic movement known as the Readjusters won all statewide elected offices and controlled the Commonwealth of Virginia from 1881 to 1885. During this time, they abolished the poll tax and the whip, radically expanded Virginia Tech, and founded Virginia State University. and readjusted the terms of the Civil War debt to save the free public schools and move the state from a fiscal deficit to a surplus.

This is just one story that shows how we as a country have managed to overcome our divisions and move forward. We have common ground. We just have to look for it.

And it shouldn’t be so difficult to seek and find these commonalities within our own families.

Families can be a great mix of many different backgrounds and experiences, just like America itself. And just like in America, there can be room for different viewpoints within families.

Most of us want the same things: a better life for our children, safe communities, good schools, freedom. That we may have different perspectives on the meaning of some of these things does not result in insurmountable differences. Instead, it calls for conversation and ultimately an understanding of why we see things differently. Because whether our ancestors came as settlers or immigrants, were enslaved, or were among the indigenous peoples of this land, what we have in common is that we are all in the same boat now. Whether we sink or swim, we will be together. And to be truly successful, we must overcome our divisions. Our own family is as good a starting point as any.

Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club and professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Chicago Crusader originally published this story on chicagocrusader.com