Her face reflected at last
On The Times’ political blog Top of the Ticket, Michelle Maltais reflects on being a biracial American. Here’s an excerpt. For other inauguration musings and anecdotes, see latimes.com/ticket.
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I have known that, as the biracial child of a black Jamaican and a white American, I have been an American with an asterisk. So when this country elected to the highest office in the United States of America Barack Hussein Obama . . . I had to come to bear witness.
The ability to see yourself reflected in your leaders, particularly when it seemed a certain impossibility, is important. I have this plastic ruler in my desk drawer at the office that displays the pictures and tenures of the U.S. presidents up to William Jefferson Clinton.
Every once in a while, I pull the thing out, look at it and shake my head. Although these men represented us all, I knew no one on it truly represented me.
In some ways, it feels a bit like the end of the movie “The Matrix,” when Neo confronts the system that everyone unknowingly was plugged into, offering them “a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.”
As Obama utters the oath of office, his family beside him, I believe I will sit quietly in a combination of stunned disbelief and pride:
Disbelief that what I feared to even imagine has actually come to pass, and pride in my country for being more than I had believed it was able to be. I may finally begin to reconcile and reconfigure my American life, asterisk erased.
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