Laura Leighton

Growing up in Dallas, Texas when the city was still small and most families were financially well off, my main concerns were doing well in school, being accepted by my peers, and during my teen years, dating cute boys. My father was a cardiologist who had helped with the first North American heart transplant, so I was well respected around town based on my name. My mother earned a PhD in 1968, when most other women in her class were not even working, and I felt funny about her constant attraction to things outside of our home. I was embarrassed by it as it went against the norm of my friends’ mother’s peers, that of being well kept and responsible to one’s family. My mother told me she would never be a "kept woman" but I had no idea what she actually meant by that. When I was 16 she worked with the Dallas Police to start The Family Place, the first shelter in Dallas for women and children who were victims of domestic abuse. I wondered why in the world she would be so consumed with so many other people she didn’t even know. Yet I felt deeply for women who were beaten in their relationships.

My father worked constantly and my mother taught courses first at Southern Methodist University (SMU), then at the Mountain View Junior College (MV). My mother said the students at SMU had notions of entitlement and she wanted to teach kids that had less fortunate backgrounds, so she moved to MV. (The people at SMU were kids like me, from my neighborhood, so what did that mean about me?) Her subjects were sociology and cultural anthropology. My father was always working, so there were countless evenings when she and I would go to movies (always the ones with subtitles), go to dinner, or hear lectures at SMU. The way to get approval in my intellectually competitive family was to excel in school. My mother gave me books to read about marriage and the family, cultural anthropology and sociology that were on her class’s reading lists, or books she was thinking about having her students read. I was her reader, her assistant, and we would discuss these books in detail. It felt good to bond over books with her, I would have done anything to have parental approval as my father was barely around, and he was tired and distant when he was home. I did well in school, but my friends weren’t interested in anything I was learning. By the time I got to college I began a rebellion that lasted five years. My best friend died and I felt I had no reason to live. I skated by in college, got a degree and tried out various jobs without any rhyme or reason.

After college and many years of struggling to find my place in the world, I married my husband Chris and started a family. My inward struggle was still intense, as my mother prepared me for life in a way, which contradicted the culture in which I had grown up in, yet stimulated my intellectual curiosity of the world. I often felt at odds with this. Very few of the people I would meet had a clue or cared about other cultures or people than their own. My ideas and interests found little audience or acceptance.

My daughters were born one year apart from each other, and after this I began to realize there were still so few role models for girls in the media, and fewer for children from different cultural backgrounds. When Julia, my older daughter turned 5, I struggled with sending her to public school, as our neighborhood school was comprised primarily of 1st generation Chinese and Vietnamese families. Caucasian families were by far the minority. All of my friends were sending their children to private schools. My mother strongly advised me to send Julia to our neighborhood school, so she would learn about first generation Asian children, learn about multi-cultural life, and become immersed in really living it. I decided to follow my mother’s advice and sent her there, but I will admit it was not easy for me. What was just a normal play date was difficult filled with the challenge of ever-present language and cultural barriers. My solution, I enrolled the girls in Mandarin Chinese class on Saturdays. After one or two classes, my four year-old daughter Valerie returned home and informed me that she and Julia were the only Americans in the class!

At this moment something profound struck me. My friends were running from children like the ones Julia went to school with, hard working families determined to have their children become American citizens. Each group wanted nothing to do with the other, yet here we all were, sharing a city, a country and a possibility filled with hope for our children. I was sensitive to the fact that adventurous, independent girls were an anomaly on children’s television, yet even more striking was that children living right here in the United States, children from so many different cultures and backgrounds were left out of the expression of what it is to be an American. I realized perhaps, I could make a difference for girls and for the inclusion of cultural differences in schools and throughout the world. This inspired me to invent a fabulous, independent and inspiring female character, turn it into an educational program, and bring it to the schools. Over several years, the program grew and became successful, until the day the two young men shot and killed students and themselves at Columbine High School. I was returning home after commencing a three-month consulting program at Eastridge Elementary School in Denver when the Columbine shootings occurred, and I was devastated and defeated.

That said, after a period of healing I have since resumed my project and have the good fortune to have an amazing team of creative professionals working on a Virtual World for young children around cultural exploration. This is where Barack Obama is important to my story.

Barack’s mother was something like my own mother. She was also a cultural anthropologist who taught her son in ways that aided him to deeply understand the people of the world. I think Barack Obama understands that for the United States to be successful both at home and as a world partner, we must allow all of us to belong, to see how much we have in common, how much we have to share and to offer one another, and how much we can teach each other about our differences and similarities. This is what will make us strong, rich and secure. I believe the fundamental dream Barack has for our country, is one of inclusiveness, respect for each other as Americans as well as world citizens. Barack Obama is a transformational figure needed right now on the United States and the World stage.