Over the years, I’ve developed the possibly strange habit of avoiding mirrors and my reflection. I avert my eyes when walking by windows across buildings and depending on my own personal level of comfort, an unsettling feeling eats away at me.

~

As a young child growing up in Texas, I had a sense of the political atmosphere and how it collided with the cultural ones, such as that of my middle class Mexican family. I remember a middle school professor voicing her disapproval of the welfare system while I held a strange silence recalling the very brief moment my mother and I received assistance. At that age I couldn’t follow any nuance to the teacher’s argument. As a thirteen year old boy, I took her remarks as a blanket judgment upon those involved in the system.

Years later on a cold night, the issues of affirmative action came up with classmates at a coffee shop, outside our university in Boston. They expressed their disagreement of the process and I listened. College admission should be based on just grades. We should have the best. They would say. I explained that I came to this university on an affirmative action program and with a scholarship through the African-American institute. It wasn’t necessarily an argument against them. They were my friends and they didn’t disapprove of me attending their university.

Even at 21 years of age, I could not offer any cogent defense but most importantly I had not yet realized that I did not need to defend myself. Even in the African-American program, counselors would continuously encourage their students not to hold questionable and doubtful feelings about the program.

And I thought I was the only one.

I was raised on the old “bootstrap” principle. I never heard the word “revolutionary” as a child. I understood the religious climate of my schools, neighborhoods, and surroundings. In contrast my home life was full of culturally different concepts. I am multiracial: black and Mexican (and Irish and Portuguese if we’re counting). My mother would often quietly hide her spiritual and religious pursuits from her peers, due to a fear of chiding in our very Catholic and Christian, military city — wiccan never bodes over well.

These worlds of conservative values, issues of race, and religion have at times negated one another. They’ve created a strange place in between where I have stood for some time. As such I’ve lived an impersonal life. Impersonal in my views towards people, race, politics. A life designed as a sort of safety where I could not find myself arriving at too many conclusions. An impersonal life for some time.

I ask myself about my hesitations to take politics to heart but try to observe with a keen eye, my own motivations. As I have become more and more familiar with the Illinois Senator, Barack Obama, I find myself returning to that same strange place in between. I wonder if portions of my trust in this man are implicitly connected to our shared multiracial experiences or just what I deem as shared. I question my intentions as I find myself shocked but in admiration of a person who may almost look like me, accomplishing what he has. I am no longer the aching, eight year old boy seeking a father figure. I am now some sort of man. A man experienced in some kind of modern, existential, pragmatism.

I have my faults. I can make emotionally-uninformed decisions that are at times objective, fair, and best. At other times: foolish and devoid. Now though, I debate my heart amidst my mind. In this gray area those who wish to persecute Obama find their supposed justifications. Am I becoming that bleeding heart? If so, does it really matter?

Barack Obama is a politician and so I coyly admit that I don’t want to approve of him but his lack of political design is something I hold as an attribute, one that is difficult to maintain in his line of work. Right now, as we speak, the debate seems to be whether Obama is black enough. Whether he is black? What black is? How black is black and why it matters. It’s a challenging and powerful discussion but strangely it outshines the real debate of his policies. It gauzes over the real issues of our society’s slow, ignorant, and naïve understanding of race, including my own ignorance.

Among my strewn thoughts on America, race, and the pulls of my heart and desire of my mind, I’ve come to the conclusion that Barack Obama is uniquely American. Absurdly American. A phenomenon that is almost exclusive to our American experience. His life story touches so many not only for its scope but because it represents the lesser recognized, social facets, of our nation. It represents that we not only offer education and opportunity but what we as a nation offer a platform for new culture.

Obama is almost an invention of America just as so many of us are.

Whatever my hesitations, I have to arrive at some conclusions. Despite and in spite of my mind, heart, history, meaning, form, shape, and beliefs, I will arrive at some conclusion.

I do support Obama.

This presidential run is about what I learned in the most earnest of cities: San Antonio, Texas. It is about the values I picked up from the laborers and blue collar workers – from my mother who worked day and night to support me. This is about my experiences in Boston and Cambridge Massachusetts: the anti-war rallys, open discussion of gender and sexual orientation, discussion of race, and religion. This presidential run is about our ability to be challenged by our taboos, our current political climate, and the wonderful unison of our hearts and minds – individually and as a nation.

Am I misinformed? Am I confused? This time around, I’ll confidently say “No.” I make no apologies. My trust in Obama is not narrow just as my life experience is not either.

~

My fear of my reflection was a fear of my face, my ideas. My fear of taking an effective enough position. It’s been a fear of not knowing if I am embraced by this nation, embraced by a community, or by anything else. They are personal issues I know well enough not to let influence my decision on Barack Obama. My open support for Obama is my means of dissolving those fears.

It is fool-hearted to support someone because they metaphorically look like you. It is great to support someone because they represent you and so many others of this nation.