With the holiday season approaching, it seems our country could not be more divided. That division has been perhaps the main overarching topic of our national conversation in recent years. And it has taken root within many of our own families.
Blood may be thicker than water, but for many American families, it seems like it is not as thick as politics. Or, if not politics specifically, then the cultural rifts that have been widened and inflamed within our political debate.
Maybe our national healing can start with our families, around the holiday table.
There are mixed views within my own family, just like there are in millions of American families. And within my family there are stories of division and stories of healing.
My family traces its roots in America on my dad’s side back 400 years to Massachusetts — the home of the first Thanksgiving. My mom’s family has also been here the better part of 400 years, but in Virginia and Maryland, tracing back to that area’s earliest white settlers and their African slaves.
When my parents fell in love as young civil rights activists in Baltimore and got married, their marriage was illegal in Maryland. Their relationship was taboo at the time. My father’s family disowned him for marrying a Black woman, and he lost his inheritance.
So I grew up on America’s racial fault line. And learning about my own family’s history has provided an important perspective on the nature of division both within the family itself and the country — our big, messy American family.
Using DNA research to trace my own family’s origins, I discovered that like President Barack Obama, I am distant cousins with former Vice President Dick Cheney. That revelation was interesting. But the revelation that I am also distant cousins with Robert E. Lee was a little harder to swallow. I was the youngest-ever national president of the NAACP. He was the Confederate general who essentially fought to preserve the institution of slavery.
The Civil War itself was a conflict that famously divided families. “Brother against brother” is a phrase commonly used to describe those divisions that emerged within many American families, especially in the border states like my home state of Maryland.
And after the Civil War, America’s divisions certainly did not go away. But there are inspiring stories of coming together as well that simply have not been told as much as the stories of division and oppression.
My grandmother’s grandfather was at the center of one of those stories. In the years immediately following Reconstruction, Edward David Bland — who had been born into slavery — led Virginia’s Black Republicans into coalition with former white Confederate soldiers to form a third party that took over the Virginia state government.
How many of us grew up learning that freedmen and the same Confederates who had fought to keep them enslaved actually came together to form a winning political party based on the common desire to save their state’s public schools?
Known as the Readjusters, the bipartisan, multiracial movement won all statewide elected offices and controlled the Commonwealth of Virginia from 1881 to 1885. In that time, they abolished the poll tax and the whipping post, radically expanded Virginia Tech and created Virginia State University, and readjusted the terms of the Civil War debt to save the free public schools and take the state from a financial deficit into a surplus.
That is just one story that illustrates how as a country we have managed to work through our divisions and move forward. We have common ground. We just need to look for it. And it should not be that difficult to search for and find that common ground within our own families.
Families can be great composites of many different backgrounds and experiences, just like America itself. And just like America, there can also be room for different viewpoints within families.
Most of us want the same things: a better life for our children, safe communities, good schools, freedom. That we might have different perspectives on what some of these things mean does not make for insurmountable differences. Instead, it begs for conversation and ultimately understanding of why we see things differently. Because whether our ancestors arrived as settlers or immigrants, were enslaved or were among this land’s Indigenous peoples, what we have in common is we are all in the same boat now. Whether we sink or float, it will be together. And to truly thrive, we must heal our divisions. Within our own families is as good a place as any to start.
Ben Jealous is the executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
