Mitali Perkins

Mr. Kristof's thesis might not hold as true for young Americans. Teens and twenty-somethings think and talk about race so differently that it's almost as if our country's divided by age instead of race. Granted, I live in Boston, which likes to think of itself as this society's hub but might actually be a strange little island unto itself. But tune in to the humor about race in youth culture, where the pain is processed in a raw, real way, proving perhaps that laughter can be good medicine. Meanwhile the majority in my generation secretly wonder if it isn't time to move "beyond the issue," while many older minorities can never think of racism is a joke. 

Senator Obama tapped into those views when he told us earlier in the campaign that there's "no black America and no white America, only the United States of America." Most people my age seemed to like that. But in this recent speech, the Senator told the truth: there are still two ways of viewing history in the past and history in the making.

Barack Obama with his maternal grandparents

Photo courtesy of the Munoz Family via Creative Commons

The pivotal moment in the speech was when he talked about his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, pictured above, who is still alive and living in Hawaii:

[She is] a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

In his book Dreams From My Father, he also told of his paternal grandfather who "didn't want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman." Why not quote them equally? Because the heart of the speech was to show that he gets how middle-aged and older blacks see things. 

Ending with a story about a twenty-three year old white woman and an older black man coming together around his campaign, Senator Obama spoke to young people, repeating his hope that one day we might indeed move "beyond racism." But, as he reminded the whole nation, that day is not here yet. With new polls showing him falling behind, taking that risk could prove costly. Naming the naked Emperor makes an unseeing crowd feel foolish, and typically we take it out on the messenger.

Thankfully, a new generation is coming of age, my teens among them, so maybe the Senator's right. The phrase "racial reconciliation" might someday move from oxymoronic to anachronistic. This century, I pray our churches speed the process instead of hindering it.

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Mitali Perkins (mitaliperkins.com) is the author of two novels for teens about a candidate’s daughter, First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover and First Daughter: White House Rules (Dutton). Her main character, Sameera Righton, described by Publishers Weekly as “an intelligent, witty and prepossessed heroine,” is keeping track of the hype around the real First Kid wannabes at www.sparrowblog.com. To learn more about the books, visit firstdaughterbooks.com. 

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But then I left my computer for ten days and discovered the truth of Howard Gardner's two sad postscripts in an otherwise upbeat take on literacy:

Two aspects of the traditional book may be in jeopardy, however. One is the author's capacity to lay out a complex argument, which requires the reader to study and reread, following a circuitous course of reasoning. The Web's speedy browsing may make it difficult for digital natives to master Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (not that it was ever easy). The other is the book's special genius for allowing readers to enter a private world for hours or even days at a time. Nowadays young people seem to have a compulsion to stay in touch with one another all the time; one of the dividends of book reading may fade away.

The latter gift of extended privacy, which I think comes more from fiction while the gift of cogency from non-fiction, is exactly what I enjoyed during my recent reading extravaganza -- each novel was a journey to another place and time, vacations within a vacation, solitude my soul relished even while enjoying time with family. 

So now I'm wondering how my digitally native sons are losing out. Will their click-here-and-there minds lose the capacity to understand long, complex arguments? Will their facebooked souls know what to do with extended solitude? Or in the future will those particular skills become as anachronistic for young adults as classical rhetoric or knightly chivalry? And how will this literacy shift affect their reading of the Bible -- will they manage to grasp Paul's cogent arguments in the Book of Romans, for example, or take the solitude they need to meditate on the Psalms? 

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