A Fighting Chance

Of course, not every kid has the same risk of becoming a victim. A large number of those gun deaths occur in poor neighborhoods. Gang violence and street crime pose a far smaller threat in well-off suburbs than in gritty inner cities. I’d spent decades trying to ring the alarm bell about the economic stress on middle-class families, but lately I’d been talking more about poor families, too. Low-income families have it so much harder: they start further behind, so that even the smallest blows can knock a family to its knees. Car trouble or a sick baby can mean losing a day or two at work, and any emergency can mean a trip to a payday lender and stepping into a trap that can cost thousands of dollars. Piled on the economic stress is the reality that the ugly claw of violence tears more often at poor families than rich ones.

The challenges faced by poor families attempting to build economic security are far more extreme, but the same erosion of investment in the future that is hollowing out America’s middle class is also destroying the more limited opportunities that poorer families have to pull themselves forward. Much of what I was fighting for in an effort to rebuild the middle class—education, a thriving economy with good jobs, a level playing field where everyone pays their share—would provide an enormous boost to those in poverty as well. Building opportunity is about building it for everyone.

It comes back to the same question: Do we take care of some of our children, or do we build opportunity for all our children? For the mothers at Faith Christian that morning, that question came much, much too late. For them, the answer was: No, we do not take care of all our children. There would be no future for their beloved sons and daughters.

I spoke to the group for just a few minutes that morning. My words felt too small for such big wounds, but Pastor Kim was kind, and so were the other mothers in the room. In the end, we held hands and prayed together.

We prayed for all our children.





Native American

The long months of campaigning seemed to be having some positive effect. And if a victory over Scott Brown still looked like an uphill battle, I was at least gaining some ground.

Then the race turned really nasty.

It started in April with a question. Sixteen years earlier, in an interview in Harvard’s newspaper, a university spokesman had defended the faculty’s lack of diversity by noting my Native American background, and now a reporter wanted to know the details. I didn’t recall the long-ago article, and when the reporter asked about it, I fumbled the question. Within a few days, we found ourselves in a full-blown campaign frenzy, with Republicans demanding that I prove who my ancestors were and accusing me of getting my job at Harvard under false pretenses.

As a kid, I had learned about my Native American background the same way every kid learns about who they are: from family. I never questioned my family’s stories or asked my parents for proof or documentation. What kid would?

My mother’s family lived in Indian Territory but my mother was the baby in the family, and by the time she was born, Indian Territory had become part of the new state of Oklahoma. My mother and her family talked about our Native American ancestry on both sides: her mother’s and her father’s families both had Native American roots.

By the time my mother was in High school, she and her family lived in Wetumka, a small town (about 1,400 people by 1920) that was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone. When my daddy began seeing my mother, his family made it clear that they did not approve. They looked down on my mother and her family, and when my father announced that he wanted to marry my mother, his parents were adamantly opposed. But my daddy and mother were very much in love, so they eloped—no fancy dress and no big group of friends and family. For someone as close to her family as my mother, this was a cut that ran deep.

For years after the marriage, the two families continued to live in the same small town, but they were almost never in the same room. As kids, we got it: There was Daddy’s family and there was Mother’s family. We saw Mother’s family all the time. But visits with Daddy’s family were infrequent, planned long in advance, and always very stiff.

Despite the trouble with Daddy’s family, my mother never hid anything from us. Everyone on our mother’s side—aunts, uncles, and grandparents—talked openly about their Native American ancestry. My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory. We loved them and we loved their stories. As my mother got older, as she lost first her father and then her mother, her brothers, and two of her sisters, she spoke more forcefully than ever about the importance of not forgetting our Native American roots.

Now, in the middle of a heated Senate campaign, Republicans insisted that all of that was a lie. They claimed I wasn’t who I said I was; they said I had cheated to get where I’d gotten.