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POLITICS | MEMOIR
Why I Write About Politics
And when I learned to care about the future of my country
I was eight years old and it was during the 2004 Democratic National Convention that my dad came into my room and woke me with an uncharacteristic gleam in his eye. It was hard for me to imagine what he would want to show me that it was worth practically pulling me from bed at that late hour. But emerging drowsily from my cozy sheets and being urgently ushered into our living room, it wasn’t exactly the Christmas come early that I’d hoped.
I rubbed my eyelids, still half asleep, as I looked toward the speaker on the TV screen. He was already mid-speech. The man who addressed America that night was tall and spoke with a mixture of booming charisma and warmth. And he was Black. I didn’t think much of that, though. I grew up in a diverse town and even at that young age had friends of varying hues.
The concepts Barack Obama addressed that night were by and large a mile above my head. He spoke in a political dialect that I didn’t have the vocabulary or understanding to properly parse. But those loose and hovering concepts about freedom and equality and the fight for an America we could each feel represented and safe inside of managed to stick with me.
