Dear Mr. President Elect

I wrote this a few days before the election and almost choked on an ice cube when, in his Grant Park speech he started to talk about a grandmother. But, alas, it was someone else. This is what I wrote.


Please forward this message if at all possible.

Mr. Obama,

I am of your age. My grandmother lived the bulk of her life in the Oakland, California area and watched as her modest neighborhood of single-family homes slowly transformed into an inner city ghetto during the 1960’s and 1970’s. She mistakenly blamed the color of the new residents skin rather than the poverty and socio-economic inequality that they suffered under for the decline of her neighborhood. I had long ago resigned myself to the fact that, because of that experience, my grandmother was—there are no polite words—a racist.
My grandmother celebrated her 103 birthday last April and, in recent weeks has been fighting declining health, but has been determined to stay with us because she wanted to vote. And vote she did, with an early ballot in the state of Nevada, for you Mr. Obama.
When my grandmother passes I will be saying goodbye to someone who defeated a racist past rather than to someone who took that contagion to the grave. Thank you.

Dennis Fox

Ps. My sincere condolences on the passing of your grandmother this day.


When I was three I have a memory, possibly one of my first, of my mother crying while watching a funeral on the television. It was 1963 and the nation was mourning JFK. Several days ago I was sent into an emotional state resembling that early memory, only now I was shedding tears of optimism rather than tears of hope snuffed out. I am middle aged, but all my life America has been inexorably moving toward a conservative notion of the meaning of things. That shift has done us so much harm, but we may now begin, if all cooperate, a long slow slog toward the light.