In all the Obama excitement, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard people say that they just don’t think America is “ready” to elect a black man. I suppose, though I don’t like to believe it, that may be true – but a lot of people go further: they say white Americans will never be ready to do so. And that, to me, is pessimism almost beyond belief.

I haven’t had all that much first-hand experience with racism. (And by that, I mean first-hand observation of racism around me.) I only heard the N-bomb dropped out loud, as a slur rather than in a Snoop Dogg context, for the first time a little over a year ago – funnily enough, while I was studying in England – and several times I’ve had to have racial slurs or jokes explained to me. I haven’t encountered racism at school, in the workplace, on the city bus – or anywhere, really, except one place where I spent some of my most-treasured times growing up: my grandparents’ house.

My grandfather was the sort of man you see in Hollywood family dramas: that hard-working, self-made, stubborn, loud, controlling, angry, but ultimately fair working-class man who usually has to learn to relate to his son’s artistic aspirations or his daughter’s career ambitions or some such storyline. The sort of man who is physically unshakeable, but often bewildered by the social changes he sees around him.

He was a man who smoked three packs a day, unfiltered, for years – but when the time came to quit, he went cold turkey, one day to the next. Because dammit he’d said he would, hadn’t he? He was a man who pounded his fist on the table and yelled, to drown out the sound of his two highly-educated sons trying to reason with him about politics. He was a man who tossed out expletives regardless of his six-year-old granddaughter (me) sitting next to him, who ranted about his immigrant barber – somehow, supposedly – collecting six welfare cheques each month, and who used words like “spade” and “I-tie”. But he was also a man who passed up a lucrative job offer in the United States in the 1960s, because he didn’t want to take even the slightest risk of his teenage sons somehow winding up in Vietnam. He was a man who let the neighbours’ kids play in the backyard swimming pool of his Hollywood-perfect, 1950s-style suburban bungalow. He was a man who used to sit me down on top of his round, hard beer-belly while we watched the Leafs game in the basement, so that we’d be at eye-level while he told old stories about Carl Brewer and Bobby Baun and the glory days of hockey.

I always knew he was a good man, if flawed. But I was still surprised, when it came down to it, to see just how cleanly he could shuck off his prejudices when given a good reason for doing so.

When I was 11 or so, a rift opened in my grandmother’s family, over my great-uncle Roy’s disowning of his two daughters. Holly was disowned when she came out of the closet; Shelley, not long after, when she became engaged to a black man. My grandmother, the youngest of seven, was the only one of Roy’s siblings who disobeyed his edict and attended Shelley’s wedding – and, to my surprise, my grandfather was right there with her. There, they re-connected with Holly (who, it so happened, was their god-child) and met her partner Jamie for the first time.

Not long after, a letter came from Roy, informing my grandmother that she, her husband, her children, and their children were all hereby disowned as well. None of us was ever to contact him again.

Well, my grandfather may not have liked gays and blacks much in the abstract, but all of a sudden he liked Uncle Roy even less. My grandparents were the only blood relations Holly and Shelley had left, and they stepped into the role of surrogate parents gladly. They invited Holly and Jamie to fly out from Vancouver and stay with them for a couple weeks, and they were the first relatives on the scene when Shelley and Ian’s first son was born. Even raising Roy’s name made my grandfather shake with rage. “That Holly’s a nice girl,” he’d say fiercely. “And her…” he’d hesitate, struggling to find the right words. “...friend, Jamie…” Then he’d shout: “She’s a nice girl, too!” and bang his fist down on the table.

When my grandmother died unexpectedly, rumour came from one of her sisters – who had, all this time, maintained contact with both our family and what remained of Roy’s – that Uncle Roy wanted to come to the funeral to say goodbye to the sister he’d cut out of his life seven years earlier. My grandfather – by this time in poor health, diabetic, and having survived a major stroke – declared that Roy would set foot in that funeral home over his dead body. Even on the day of, we still wondered if Roy would show up – and I remember my grandfather leaning heavily on his cane, in his best suit, looking dignified until he opened his mouth and unleashed a string of curses, declaring that he would throw Roy out with his own bare hands. I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of him.

Okay, so maybe it would be a nice ending to this story if my grandfather had opened his arms and forgiven Uncle Roy, who wanted to come pay his respects. But there were the feelings of Holly and Shelley to consider – both would be there, along with Jamie, Ian, and two young sons. Would Roy snub them? Insult them? Say something rude about the two young boys, both visibly a product of a union that Roy believed was unclean? No one knew. And as it turned out, we never found out – Roy was too ill to crash the funeral, and died only two months later, without ever having met his grandsons.

The point of this sad, dysfunctional story is this: sometimes, conservative values can win out over conservative prejudices. I was surprised that my grandfather went to Shelley’s wedding, because I knew very well that he didn’t approve of inter-racial marriage. But over-ruling that belief was another, stronger one: that family comes first. That you don’t walk away from your blood, no matter what. So he went to the wedding, on principle I suspect more than out of any sense of approval, and there he met Ian and Jamie. And of course, as I’ve always believed, one-on-one interaction is the best cure for prejudice. Unable to avoid seeing the complete happiness of Ian and Shelley, or the fact that Jamie was “a nice girl”, what may have started as an act of principle became genuine affection and acceptance.

I believe that the Uncle Roys of this world are vastly outnumbered by the people like my grandfather. And so there’s a lesson here for American politics: prejudice is not permanent, no matter how entrenched it may seem. Yes, some people may not be “ready” to elect Obama this year – but that can and will change. And who knows, for some voters it may even be their own old-fashioned values driving the change.