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Do you think Strom Thurmond loved his baby mama? Did he love her gentleness, her sense of humor, the look of her luscious brown skin or the feel of her soft, cottony hair? Or was she just a booty call? No, those are generally consensual. And how could a poor, black, teenaged maid consent to have sex with her wealthy, white, adult employer in the 1920s, and in South Carolina, no less? If it wasn’t statutory rape, perhaps it was just another case of American family values, Southern Christian style. 

This was the South of many of my ancestors. I remember clearly my grandmother recalling her own grandmother, who had been a slave, stating emphatically that there was nothing on God’s earth lower than a man who would sell his own child. But, many so-called Christian American white men did just that. Strom didn’t sell his daughter but he did banish her from public view. She became reborn after his death, his “legitimate” family acknowledged that yes, she was their daddy’s outside chile. I wonder whether they would have claimed her had she not been so genteel, so fair-skinned, wellspoken and eddicated. Suppose Strom’s chile had been of a darker hue with wild, nappy hair, splittin’ verbs, on welfare, perhaps a baby mama herself. Would they have claimed her then?  

According to George Bush—well, according to his inaugural speech writers: “From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and Earth.” 

Uh, excuse me? Hello? Are we invisible? Do we not count any more today than we did then? (Condi, are you hearing this?) 

The same Southern belles who sipped mint juleps, daintily dabbing sweat from their milky brows while reciting favorite Bible verses to their gentlemen callers, are the same “Christian” white women who packed plentiful picnic baskets lest their little darlings become cranky while attending community lynchings of innocent black men.  

Sometimes, those lynched were innocent black women. And sometimes, those women were pregnant. And sometimes, the fathers of those innocent unborn babies were white men exercising the rights granted to them by this country’s slave-owning Founding Fathers. Talk about family values. Talk about being pro-life. 

But that was then, you say. This is now. Get over it. I didn’t do it. 

Well, I haven’t committed any crimes either, yet brown-skinned Americans like me are routinely subjected to racial profiling whether we’re walking, shopping or driving and we are still denied equal opportunities when seeking jobs, financing, education, housing, health care, you name it. Do you object equally to that? Even saxophone blowin’, Harlem livin’ Bill Clinton couldn’t muster enough courage and honesty to lead this country in apologizing to African Americans for the holocaust on our soil and the continuing vestiges of American racism. Is the melanin in our skin so repellant? (Note to self: essay re tanning salons and how much is too much.) 

Bush did make one reference to racism which—coincidentally?—directly followed the sentence: “Americans…must always remember that even the unwanted have worth.” The reference was as follows: “…our country must abandon all the habits of racism, because we cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of bigotry at the same time.” I would have loved to have heard exactly what Bush meant by “habits” and “baggage,” what he acknowledges is left over from slavery days. Apparently, fellow Southerner Trent Lott, loyal supporter of segregationist-by-day Strom Thurmond, doesn’t represent something left over, seeing as he was the honored emcee of Bush’s inaugural evening and all. 

Bush further stated that “(Our) public interest depends on private character, on integrity and tolerance toward others,” and that “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” 

What? One of my father’s favorite Shakespeare quotes is: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We are left to wonder exactly which Americans and whose family values, beliefs and interests are to be fully tolerated and by whom. I have to wonder if Jesus himself were alive today and had run for the presidency on the platform that because we are all brothers and sisters in the eyes of God, we are obligated to put first the needs of the poor, the sick and the outcasts, how many Christian-Family-Values-Republicans would have voted for him? 

This is my America. Some of my ancestors were caretakers of this stolen land. Some of my ancestors were thieves. (Although the writers of my children’s textbooks prefer the word “settled” to “stole.”) Some of my ancestors were kidnapped and raped. Some of my ancestors kidnapped and raped. It is all part of our collective history. We’re stuck with it and it’s high time we owned up to it, all of it, the good and the bad. 

We can’t move on until we do. 

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