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“You can be anything,” we teach our kids. And then the lunch bell rings, and they scrounge their pockets for pieces of paper with men’s faces on them. Powerful men. You can feel these men’s faces on each coin pressed into the lunch lady’s hands.
“You can be anything,” we say, as we hand them a Teddy bear to cheer them up or as we encourage their creativity with Lincoln logs.
“You can be anything,” we tell them from the front seat, as we drive the MacArthur exchange and then scoot them off to a school named Curtner or Weller or Chabot or Bowditch or Berkeley, which maybe like mine, were all named for leaders - men.
And the street names and the school names teach them something. Some of them can be anything. Some of them won’t be much.
You can tell who probably won’t be anything, because they aren’t the kind of person on a coin, the kind of person a hall or a county or a highway is named for. And in learning who among themselves really can be anything, they learn how to treat each other.
But today, Kamala Harris changes that. She’s not the president, so she might not be on a coin or a bill. But surely we’ll at least see schools named for her. And little boys and little girls who go to those schools will learn something different.
Representation matters.
