Yes We Can: Love One Another and Build Happy, Healthy Families by Gwyneth Bolton

Strong, healthy, happy families are a must if we’re going to remain whole as a people, families of all shapes, make-ups and sizes. We don’t get a lot of healthy and happy models of these kinds of families for black people from television and movies. I hope that the image of the new first family does something to alter the often-negative representations of black folks we often see. The first family offers a different model of black love and black families for the entire world to see. Who can see the way our new president looks at his wife and not see the value of strong, healthy, loving relationships? Who can see the way Sasha and Malea’s faces literally lit up when their father walks into the room and not see the power of loving, healthy, happy families?

Many people are hoping that the new first family will influence the negative, stereotypical images that exist in the public sphere about black families and black people. I also hope that this powerful image of black love replaces a lot of the harmful images out there in the national imagination about black people. But I’m more hopeful that the love this family so clearly and so publicly have for one another changes the way we begin to interact with one another and see ourselves. I hope it makes us believers that yes we can love one another and build happy and healthy families.

There was quite a bit of outrage last Father’s Day when then Senator Obama offered suggestions about parenting to black fathers. Looking back, maybe the tone and setting could have been a little different for that particular rhetorical moment. But, I do hope that missing-in-action black dads might see the way Sasha and Malea look at their father and realize the richness that they could have in their own lives by simply being fathers to their children. You can’t tell me that when you see the President and the first lady you don’t start believing that two people in a strong relationship working together can’t do just about anything they put their hearts and minds to. Yes we can!

The first family offers perhaps the most transformative model of the power of love and romance. And I hope that we tap that potential and nurture the love in our own families, treat it with more care and watch it thrive out of our homes and into our communities. Our history of survival in this often-hostile land proves that, yes we can make it through just about any hardship when we love and look out for one another. Many of us are where we are today because somebody hoped and prayed and believed we could make it. Other models for the transformative power of love exist in the amazing romance novels my fellow authors of Kimani Romance and I write. I encourage you all to check out some of these novels if you haven’t read one yet. I think we could all benefit from a little more love. We’re in a moment where people collectively invested their hearts and minds in a moment of hope and change. I think adding love and a little imagination might just take us where we need to be, or darn close to it. We can make it  all the way there. Yes we can… Yes we well, indeed!

Much love and peace…

Gwyneth Bolton

Gwyneth Bolton
http://www.gwynethbolton.com
Hightower Honors: Four brothers on a mission to protect, serve and love
Book four SIZZLING SEDUCTION available October 2009