Toot Is Dying

Barack Obama's white grandmother, Toot, as he calls her, is seriously ill, so ill that Obama is taking a day and a half out of the home stretch of a two-year presidential run to go to Hawaii and be with her.

The man loves his grandmother, obviously, and so do a lot of us, but this man is universally regarded by traditional American standards (one drop of black blood makes you black), as African American, and his grandmother is white.

That fact has given rise to a number of complications in Obama's complicated personal history, including the now famous incident in which his grandmother was afraid to take the bus to work because of a panhandler who had accosted her at the bus stop. Her husband, Obama's grandfather, was furious with her, and the young Obama couldn't figure out why.

"'It's probably a little scary for her,'" Obama recalls telling his grandfather in the autobiography Dreams from My Father, "'seeing some big man block her way. It's really no big deal.'"

"'It is a big deal to me,'" the grandfather answers, "'You know why she's so scared this time? I'll tell you why. Before you came in, she told me the fella was black.'"

"Gramps slumped into a chair in the living room and said he was sorry he had told me," Obama writes. "Before my eyes, he grew small and old and very sad."

Such are the sad and complicated consequences of America's sad and complicated experience with race. But to our potentially great benefit, Obama turns out to have been the kind of person who, when handed a lemon, makes lemonade. 

Something about his own struggle with racial identity lit a fire in Obama that has driven him all the way to the door of the White House. He discovered that his own story had the power to give people in our sometimes hopeless country great reason to hope.

By personifying the real connections between people in an atmosphere in which people are constantly at each others' throats, by having a white grandmother that he loves enough to set aside his ambitions at a critical moment, he demonstrates the possibility of connection, reconciliation, and reconstruction in America at large. 

I think that's why he's surging in the polls right now.

People are realizing that he's not a "Muslim;" he's not a "terrorist;" he's not a "socialist;" he's not the feared Other, he's one of us. People are realizing that the boundary between "Real America" and that other frightening shadowland is not only completing open and porous, but that maybe it's OK that it is that way.

For 200 years we've whispered about Thomas Jefferson and his hidden half-black offspring; for the first time people are beginning to realize that the ties of blood and community that stick all of us together in the same teeming soup may not be a national shame or scandal or disaster, but one of our saving strengths.