Healing family divisions: a new approach to national unity

As the holiday season approaches, it seems our country could not be more divided. This divide has been almost the overarching theme of our national conversation in recent years. And this has taken root in many of our families.

Blood may be thicker than water, but for many American families, it doesn’t seem to be as thick as politics. Or, if not politics specifically, then the cultural divides that have widened and flared up in our political debates.

Perhaps our folk treatment can begin with the family, at the festive table.

My own family has mixed views, as do millions of American families. And in my family there are stories of division and stories of healing.

My family traces its roots in America on my dad’s side 400 years back to Massachusetts, home of the first Thanksgiving. My mom’s family has also been here for the better part of 400 years, but in Virginia and Maryland, tracing back to the earliest white settlers in the area and their African slaves.

When my parents fell in love as young civil rights activists in Baltimore and married, their marriage was illegal in Maryland. At that time, their relationship was taboo. 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 history has provided an important perspective on the nature of division both within the family itself and within the country—our big, messy American family.

Using DNA research to trace my own family lineage, I discovered that, like President Barack Obama, I am a distant relative of former Vice President Dick Cheney. This discovery was interesting. But discovering that I’m also a distant cousin of Robert E. Lee was a little harder to swallow. I was the youngest national president of the NAACP. He was a Confederate general who essentially fought to preserve the institution of slavery.

The Civil War itself was a conflict that divided families. “Brother against brother” is a phrase commonly used to describe the rifts that have arisen in many American families, especially in border states like my home state of Maryland.

And after the Civil War, America’s differences certainly did not disappear. But there are also inspiring stories of unification that simply haven’t been told as much as stories of division and oppression.

My grandmother’s grandfather was at the center of one such story. In the years immediately following Reconstruction, slave-born Edward David Bland led Virginia’s black Republicans into a coalition with white former 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 fought to keep them in slavery actually came together to create a victorious political party based on a shared desire to save their state’s public schools?

A bipartisan, multiracial movement known as the “Readgusters” held every elected office in the state and controlled the Commonwealth of Virginia from 1881 to 1885. At that time, they abolished the poll tax and the whipping post, radically expanded Virginia Tech and created the University of Virginia, and changed the terms of the Civil War debt to preserve free public schools and take the state from a financial deficit into a surplus.

This is just one story that illustrates how we as a country have managed to overcome our differences and move forward. We have points of contact. We just have to look for it. And it shouldn’t be so difficult to look for and find this point of contact in your own families.

Families can be a wonderful mix of many different backgrounds and experiences, just like America itself. And as in America, there can be room for different points of view in families.

Most of us want the same thing: a better life for our children, safe communities, good schools, freedom. Just because we may have different views on what some of these things mean does not mean that the differences are insurmountable. Instead, it requires a conversation and ultimately an understanding of why we see things differently. Because whether our ancestors arrived as settlers or immigrants, were enslaved or were among the indigenous peoples of this land, what we have in common is that we are all in the same boat now. Whether we sink or float, everything will be together. And to truly thrive, we must heal our differences. In our own families, this is just as good a place to start.

Ben Jeloz is the executive director of the Sierra Club and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.