I wanted to share a wonderful article I read this morning from the Vancouver Sun. It’s about this historic election and how we can marvel as a nation as so many of us voted with our hearts and our conscience to elect our next president Barack Obama.
It is truly a new world! Americans move a step closer to post-racial societyBarack Obama has moved America a step closer to the post-racial society he envisions and the dream proposed four decades ago by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Obama's election has signaled to millions of white, black and brown Americans, as well as millions of others in countries still dealing with their colonial histories, that skin color does not exclude a person from being chosen to hold the most powerful office in the world.
It showed that Americans are now color blind enough that they no longer say one thing and do another in the privacy of the voting booth as they did in 1982 when Tom Bradley, the former mayor of Los Angeles, was expected to become governor of California, but didn't.
The election of Obama showed that race no longer takes precedence over more important considerations such as economic policy, character or competence.
Of course, real discrimination still exists. It was only a few weeks ago that two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested after plotting to kill Obama and 88 other African-Americans (14 by beheading).
Republicans used coded language to play on race and draw votes away from Obama after they had driven both the Latino and Arab-Americans away because of their immigration policies.
But it didn't work and, for the first time since 1964 when Democratic president Lyndon Johnson forced desegregation, voters in some of the so-called red states in the south turned their backs on the Republicans.
Still, race matters in the United States largely because of what Obama calls his country's "original sin" - slavery. Its legacy is in the statistics. African-Americans are more likely to be poor, badly educated, badly housed and come from single-parent families than other Americans. Their babies are more likely to die; their young men more likely to die violently.
But Obama seems comfortable in his skin. He is not that stereotype of angry, African-American leader. He is truly African and American, part black and part white. His past didn't include either poverty or privilege. He grew up in Hawaii, where one in five residents is of mixed race. His life is not one of disappointment, but of ground-breaking success.
As an Illinois senator, Obama is neither an outsider nor a Washington insider. His unprecedented fundraising from individuals has left him largely unbeholden to corporations or even African-American group interests.
If he seems at ease with middle-aged, white guys, who are the most likely to say that they would never vote for a black president, how could he not be? Obama's middle-class, Caucasian grandparents influenced him at least as much as the angry Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Obama also provides a generational break. After four terms of baby boomers in the White House and set against 72-year-old John McCain, Obama attracted new and younger voters. The language he uses is different and so is the technology. He not only spoke about change, he text-messaged it to more than four million people desperate for leadership in difficult times.
It would be enough to expect him to be an interlocutor between the angry and excluded on both sides of the American color divide, the person to resolve the legacies of slavery and finish the business of the civil rights movement.
But there are also expectations that he'll end (in victory) the wars that George W. Bush started, restore the economy, fix health care, put a roof over everyone's head and a cooked chicken (real or tofu) in every oven.
And those are only some of the great and, possibly crushing, hopes now resting on the thin, elegantly clad shoulders of Barack Hussein Obama, the first African-American president.
Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun columnist
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