While the walls of my mother's living room are decorated with framed pictures of her children and grandchildren in different stages of childhood and adulthood, the smiling faces of Bill and Hillary Clinton occupy the prime wall space - the area just above her elaborate window dressing.
No matter how adorable her most recent grandchild is, or how many awards and honors my siblings and I win, or how many elections or Monica Lewinskys in soiled blue dresses come and go, the photo of the Clintons hangs high on our wall like a shining star on a Christmas tree.
I'm not quite sure when or why my mother fell so deeply in love with the Clintons, but I remember hearing her curse the name of all that is Republican very early in my life in the United States.
As a black, immigrant woman working menial jobs to support the youngest of her nine children, she believed she had much reason to be leery of the conservative faction. She has since raised her children, settled into a career and bought a home. And she still remains fiercely loyal to the Democratic Party.
I don't blame her because I haven't found anything particularly attractive about the GOP either. But I wonder how much of my choice of party affiliation had to do with my own findings and how much had to do with my familial influences and my inherited unwillingness to see the other side.
I always accuse conservatives of being selfish, and uncaring about the plight of the "other man." I always find myself arguing passionately about how much of a better place the world would be if these people would just open themselves to the truth - the universal truth and not just their own self-serving version of the truth.
But if I want to be absolutely fair, if I want to sit on my high horse of righteousness without a saddle of hypocrisy, I will have to do the same.
The conservative view of an issue like affirmative action has always seemed impossible to me. It burned me to think that educated people - people who've sat through just as many history classes as I have - could feel secure in their assertion that minorities and whites were on a level playing field in the United States. Centuries of far-reaching discrimination and serious oppression negatively shaped the identity of blacks in America since the day the first slave stood on the auction block. But after a few decades of trying to right an incredible wrong, they were ready to throw their hands up and cry foul.
I tuned out their contention that affirmative action had the ugly side effect of casting doubt on the skill of many intelligent and capable minorities. Much like any other conservative argument, I chalked it up to malicious propaganda. They only see it that way because they automatically assume blacks are inferior, just like their fathers and grandfathers did - all the more reason for us to keep a leery eye on them.
But if I really wanted to practice what I preach about trying to see things from the other perspective, I would want to find out exactly what about these issues makes some people so uneasy, and what they would propose as a better alternative.
As much as I admire my mother and others like her for holding true to what they believe has been true to them, I realize that there is also a certain danger in being unmovable - especially in a world with so many different ideals and practices.
I will admit, no matter how far I delve into this superior way of dealing with the divisive world of social and political principles, there are certain conservative standards to which I will never be able to resolve my own perception of the truth. But these exceptions will only be extended to the issues that have been tried and proven one way or another with little wiggle room for personal perception.
Even with the touchy issues, in the spirit of fairness and resolution, I will listen to at least ten minutes of conservative argument before I start letting my very liberal mind run rampant.
Unless said conservative argument comes from people named Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly - even open minds have limits.
