First off, apologies for the delay in writing about the election. When it was all said and done, I found myself at first paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of the moment, and since then so full of thoughts that it was impossible to make much sense of them. I still feel a bit like that, but I’m going to attempt a cohesive thread.

That Barack Obama won so handily came as no surprise to me (though the electoral numbers ended up even a bit bigger than the most positive polling suggested), given his message and the real wants and needs of mainstream America — not to mention the audacious atrocity that was the McCain campaign. For months, however, the actual narrative of Obama’s journey has been lost in the details (of attack ads and policy pronouncements, gotchas and gaffes, pitbulls and plumbers). It reared its head again on Tuesday as soon as the first results starting coming in, and it is this: Americans have elected a black man as president, and (in modern terms, at least) by a landslide. But a sad truth is that the epochal nature of this moment hasn’t hit everyone — in fact, I’ve talked to a number of people here in southcentral Kentucky who either don’t recognize what a moment this is or who cynically dismiss it as being of little real importance.

Interestingly, it’s a sad truth that Obama himself alluded to many times over the course of the campaign: Our politics has become so divisive that we throw out the baby with the water. A brief perusing of my Facebook “status updates” list will suffice as an example: On Election Night, a good number of my evangelical Christian friends posted updates such as “Oh crud…”, “Here come higher taxes”, “Pray for our nation”, etc. Over the course of the longest campaign in American history, Barack Obama, a liberal, Christian politician in the mold of John F. Kennedy or FDR was painted as an absolute perversion of all that is right and good; it was based on cherry-picked aspects of his minimal legislative experience, two or three associations with less-desirable people (as if each of us doesn’t have a few of these ourselves), the notion that Christianity and unfettered free-market capitalism must go hand in hand, and his more modest approach to using the world’s most potentially destructive military force overseas.

All these things and more may, in your eyes and others, make him undesirable as a leader, or certainly the lesser of two choices for commander-in-chief. This is within the bounds of both reason and human decency. But none of these things make him a “terrorist” or justify someone “kill him” or represent some sort of cosmic punishment visited upon us by God Himself. Hyperbole? No, just the sincere (if secret) thoughts of a too-large number among us. But put aside the vilest hate… What I am to point out is that otherwise good-hearted, loving people cannot see past policy differences and personal preferences to the fact that the election of Obama — whether he ends up a great leader or a merely adequate one — is much bigger than a four-year term. It is, quite truly, the beginning of a new era in American history, an era where every man, woman and child of every color (though certainly not of every religion) can see that here, all are equal (if not in equally sufficient circumstances) and all can achieve based on their intelligence, determination and passion — regardless of race.

I strongly suspect this is due to subtle racism or prejudice, often of the kind that is subconscious and would be heated denied if the label was applied. For people like me in heavily white areas, “black culture” or “the minority” is something we see on TV more than we come across it on the street. Meanwhile, the black people we really are acquainted with, we know them through work or church or school — in other words, we know them as sharing our world, and we don’t give much thought to the significantly different aspects of our lives, families, etc.

Yesterday I talked to a very fundamentalist white girl who told me that, while she didn’t vote for Obama or like many of his political views, she was really excited to watch him accept victory and usher in what I will now and forevermore call The Obama Era. Another friend relayed the story of a black man who told him that now he would not have to lie to his children — telling them that they could grow up to be anything they put their mind to — because now it is a provable truth, not a nice idea that’s yet to actually take place.

The Obama Era does not mean that race relations are “fixed” or that the socioeconomic struggles that show themselves so strongly among different ethnic groups are now gone. In fact, as the first black president, Obama will be under an enormous sort of reverse pressure, at least in his first term, to “stay away from race” and focus on “everyday Joes” — i.e. white, working-class people. This is good political advice, but it’s a shame that our politics demands it. For if Obama was to make addressing our nation’s color-line disparities in education and income and housing and drug abuse his main priority, he’d be easily put away in the next election cycle — if not ignored altogether during his first by a majority white, majority wealthy legislative branch.

Still, it is a huge moment in American history — and one with which Obama himself proved amazingly self-aware. His victory speech, while not dwelling in the civil rights movement, paid sufficient tribute to it and expressed a profoundly non-cynical view of the progress we’ve made and the progress we’ve yet to make. One of the chief criticisms of Obama initially (pre-Ayers, pre-Wright, pre-”celebrity) went like this: “He’s not proud of his country? What about America does he think needs to be changed? What would he fix? America’s the greatest place on earth, but he doesn’t think so!” The truth, however, is more nuanced, too nuanced to bog down a political campaign traveling the road of soundbites and cable news. What struck me most about Obama’s speech — almost brought tears to my eyes, in all honesty — was his tale of the 106-year-old black woman who had literally watched history unfold before her eyes. The description of her life was a stirring thing in and of itself, though in and of itself it ultimately meant very little. But what grabbed me was the image of her, 106 years old, casting her ballot for a black man as president — and Obama’s subsequent question: If his daughter lives a century, what history would have unfolded before her eyes?

There is change to be made, even if we don’t know what it is and can’t imagine how our nation could be made better. There is a reason to hold onto hope in America — hope on top of happiness and appreciation, not in place of them — and there is work to be done. All were created equal, our Fathers told us, and a great many of us believe it. After creation, however, is where the winnowing is done — and too many of us, through no fault of our own, ever make it back. A President Obama, no matter how good a leader he turns out to be, can do little of himself to change that. But the simple fact that he was elected may do a great deal more than anyone ever dreamed.

Tags: Barack Obama, race relations, The Obama Era

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, politics, race. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.