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On the corner of Jefferson and Polk, South Loop, Chicago
I’m guessing that I attended the only party for Barack Obama’s inauguration where someone came out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles. I watched the ceremony at my son Carter’s preschool yesterday. The group of three- and four-year-olds were amazingly patient and sat dutifully through most of the proceedings, but as the ceremony wore on, they started to get restless. During the new President’s acceptance speech, one little boy got up to use the restroom, and then hobbled back into the room to ask for help when he was finished, unconcerned that he was naked from the waist down.
I’m not sure how much the kids understood about what was happening on the TV, made obvious by the presence of that shameless little boy. One girl shouted, “That’s Jesus!” as the network showed a picture of the Statue of Liberty, and the resounding response to Joe Biden hugging his sons after he was sworn in was, “Ew, they’re hugging and kissing.” But they all knew the new President. “The girl is Michelle Obama and the boy is Barack Obama,” one boy explained to a friend. Carter was excited about the inauguration mainly because it meant his mom and I would be coming to his school for a party. I think by now he understands the concept of President as something like the country’s daddy.
The best part of this election is that someday I’ll have to explain to Carter and his sister Sadie why it was historic retroactively, because hey won’t grow up in a world where the idea of a black President seems absurd. Living in a cosmopolitan city, they’re already light years ahead of their parents anyway. I grew up in an all-white small town in Indiana, and my wife came from a fairly homogenous North Shore suburb of Chicago. The preschool where we watched Barack Obama take the oath of office is the prime example of how different their perspective will be. Carter is one of the few white faces in a class filled with African American, Latino, and Asian kids, and in his eyes, nothing was particularly special about the face on TV other than that he was the guy Mommy and Daddy wanted to win.
I don’t claim any personal knowledge of racism. I grew up around a passive aggressive form of bigotry, kids in school or co-workers at summer jobs who casually tossed around the N-word but didn’t have the guts to actually utter it in front of a black person. The most overt racism I ever witnessed personally was when someone shouted it from a moving car at the one black kid on my American Legion baseball team. I never doubted that the stereotypes were there in my small-town world, but it just wasn’t part of my daily experience, mostly because I didn’t grow up around many African-Americans on which it could be inflicted.
I want to say that my kids will grow up in a world where race won’t matter, but I’m not that naive. Around the time of the election, Carter started talking about how he and one of his white friends from school were “peach-colored,” while others were brown. My heart sank until I realized the teachers merely had been doling out crayons so the kids could color self-portraits with the right skin tone. Barack Obama’s election doesn’t end racism or even come close to settling the score for centuries of discrimination, and Carter and Sadie won’t grow up in a world devoid of race. Despite the diversity of Carter’s classroom, Chicago is still one of the country’s most segregated cities, and will continue to be for the foreseeble future. Race will always be an issue in their world, but maybe now it can start to become mostly a matter of what crayon you use to draw a picture of yourself.
The kids in Carter’s class broke into spontaneous applause yesterday whenever the crowd in Washington cheered, oblivious to one of the teachers, a middle-aged African American woman, handing out Kleenex to the rest of the adults in the room. I’m starting a new full-time job next week after staying home with him for nearly four years, and yesterday was my last chance to spend much time at school with him during the day. If I wasn’t going to be in Washington for the inauguration, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be.
Later at home, I watched the news with Carter. He looked at a video of Obama’s speech, and said, “You need a tie and microphone to be President.” He decided he wanted to dress like the President, so I got one of my ties and put it around his neck. He ran around holding a Lightning McQueen flashlight as a microphone, making pronouncements about his first day in office, then, in his haste to get into the bathroom, pulled down his pants and accidentally peed all over the back of the tie. My day was bookended by two preschoolers dropping trou, not really the way I wanted to remember it. But on a day when we learned that anyone can be President, maybe one of those two little exhibitionists can too. All you need is a tie and a microphone.
