Some things come along only once in a lifetime. Today I, a white male, voted for a black man and two white women for the highest offices in our state. North Carolina never looked so little like the state it was when I was born.
I grew up in a small town in North Carolina with a population of less than 30,000. It was in the largest, but poorest county in the state. The education level was and still is very low. Racial tensions have always been high, as was the church attending population. My father left when I was 3 and therefore it was only my mother and I for the next 7 years until she remarried. We lived in a working class apartment complex that was filled with single mothers, both white and black, lots of young adults and very few traditional families. This doesn’t bode well for the progressive rearing of children in most cases, but sometimes it produces the most productive and successful of individuals.
A young single mother can teach a son a lot of things. One is to be confident and aspire to whatever desired. Anything can be achieved if the mind is set on the goal. Well, most things can be. Struggling is part of this journey and in North Carolina, a state that has seen massive layoffs over the years of factory workers (both office and assembly line), this struggle can seem even harder. My mother drew the short straw a couple of times but kept pushing us forward. What’s a young boy to do but keep an optimistic mindset. Surely things will get better. Over time they do but that’s not from government regulations or attention to detail in the column of race relations or financial hardships of lower income families. Many men and women of all races struggled in this small town, but it was mostly the minorities and the women that seemed to be undercut. Again, this didn’t bode well for the progressive rearing of children.
Things change and move forward in time. I later moved to larger cities and even abroad for a couple of years. Oh, how foreign lands will expand the mind. Some political landscapes progress at points, but mostly they digress into comfortable territory. We become complacent by creating analogies and anecdotes of specific cases that seem to represent the whole. These are not completely accurate and shortcut the political minefield that has been created through media saturation and candidate scrutiny over the past few decades.
Other issues dominate these stories, including race, sexuality, poverty and sex. Race and sex have come up as topics more and more in recent media focus because of the current candidates running for national offices. We have yet to reach the point of looking at each other with equal perception. But we should. It has been 143 years since the abolition of slavery, 138 years since the 15th Amendment (granting the right to vote regardless of race), and 40 years since the end of the civil rights movement. It has been 88 years since the 19th Amendment which abolished discrimination of vote by a person’s sex. We could have moved further by now, but we haven’t, especially in the deep south, including North Carolina.
That said, walking into the voting booth today and knowing that my choices for President, Vice President, Governor, and State Senator were not as standard as they may have been 30 years ago felt redeeming. At the top of the ticket for each of these offices, and many more down the ballot, were not only white men, but women and men (of various races). All electoral races matter but it is the top tier of these choices that we make our largest burden placements. It feels as though finally in our history, the United States and North Carolina in specific feels as though race and sex have less, although not zero, to do with qualifications.
A white male just may win one of these top elections but let’s hope it’s not because of his skin color, but because of his qualifications. North Carolina seems to have stood still in the past 30 years. White males dominated most, if not all political races. No longer will this be the case, the past few elections have erased this stigmata. The rapid growth in North Carolina’s population has also started to change the political makeup as well. We are more diverse and with diversity comes progression. Or so we hope.
If there’s anything I learned from growing up in a racially diverse and tense small town with a single mother, it’s that anyone can become what they want, as long as the passion is there. It was for this reason, among many, that walking out of the voting booth on S. Salisbury Street in Downtown Raleigh felt so (expletive) monumental. The ballots were colorful and the results may be as well. 2008 will change the landscape of not only national politics but local ones as well. This has little to do with party lines but cultural progress. North Carolina is moving forward and may it continue to pursue any dream it aspires to, despite race, sex, religion or any other creed. Let’s also retain it as a landscape suitable for the progressive rearing of future generations. We owe it to ourselves, our grandparents and our children.
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