America’s ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’ Moment
The Academy Award-winning movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress), starring Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, and Katharine Houghton, came out in 1967, causing a stir because of its theme of interracial marriage between an African American man and a Caucasian woman. It’s a great movie but one that seems dated in its earnestness and bygone brand of liberalism. Still, the film, like “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947), was groundbreaking in its attempt to tackle the more subtle forms of racism in polite society.
“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was on my mind this week as I look nervously at daily polls in the presidential election. I’m a latecomer to supporting Barack Obama. I fervently supported John Edwards until he dropped out of the race early this year. But my acceptance of Obama as my candidate has grown into true support. Like many I knew, I was put off by the messianic figure being sold to me by legions of online and real-world acquaintances. Now that I am behind Barack Obama, I feel much too invested in the election and marvel at how close it is. After all that we’ve been through as a country under Bush II, how could nearly half of the country support a Republican so much like the outgoing president?
I am finding it hard to stick to polite topics of conversation, drifting back too often with relative strangers and new acquaintances into the off-limits realms of politics and religion. But I’m not the only one. My children’s eye doctor recently dragged me into a discussion of the presidential election, offering that she thinks that Obama is a ‘socialist’ who will raise taxes and socialize medicine. She went on to posit that the country’s economic recession and collapse of several large banks was due to ACORN and CRA and home loans to ‘poor people of color’. I should add that I said nothing to get this political discussion started. I just sat on the exam chair holding my son and trying to get him to hold still and to stop my daughter from using the flash on her camera. The only zinger I managed to pull off was bringing up Sarah Palin. The doctor nodded ruefully, as if to acknowledge that voting for a ticket that included Palin was a necessary evil. ’Well,” I said, determined to have the last word at with someone to whom I’ve given thousands of dollars over the years, “voting for Palin after all of these years of Bush would be like ‘Dumb and Dumber.’”
I think my out-of-line remark was the only thing that reminded the doctor that she had also broached the social order by bringing up politics in such an opinionated manner with patients.
Other people I know use code words to wring their hands out loud about how, despite being Democrats and former Hillary supporters, they are having trouble rallying behind someone ‘like Obama’. That it’s hard to overcome the way they were brought up or ‘where they come from’. The secondary remarks are about raising taxes and the possibility of ‘socialized medicine’ (my conversations have often been with physicians). But it all points to race being the final taboo for those repulsed by McCain and Palin yet hesitant to vote for Obama despite admiring him.
For some people I’ve spoken to, it seems that they are having to confront their ideas about race before they were ready to. By voting for an African American candidate, they would have ready themselves for the idea that one of their children might marry such a person, for example. I am thinking of it as our collective “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” Moment, or in the words of the Dude in “The Big Lebowski”, deciding whether we are “cool with the whole interracial thing.”
