HISTORY
A Black Man President? This Is Change We Can Believe In
LIFETIME AGO, THIS WRITER DID A FEATURE STORY exploring the consequences of growing up “biracial.” What always comes back to me is when one woman who grew up straddled between two races said that she had come to see herself as an “ambassador” to the world.
This, she said, was the gift of growing up biracial.
On this eve of history, when America appears poised to elect the first man of color as president, even if we can’t agree on taxes or global warming or international strategy, let us agree that the rise of Senator Barack Obama is a turning point in America’s race relations, when all things became possible to all men. (The women will have to wait.)
The excitement, and, of course, hope, that this candidate generates among people and in particular, African Americans, awakens potential for our entire nation. It is impossible to read about the joy and engagement that Obama’s candidacy has created among blacks in particular without getting goose bumps.
• To the New York Times, 20-year-old Bianca Williams says she returned to college after seeing Obama in the first debate. “I started thinking maybe I could help my community like he did. If he could do it then I could do it. It woke me up, careerwise. It just gave me the willpower to go on.”
• In Nairobi, 22-year-old Ida Atieno tells the Associated Press, "Obama represents hope. I see myself gaining from an Obama victory because of the inspiration he gives me."
• In France, Kama Des-Gachons, a 28-year-old Frenchwoman whose parents came from Mali, says, “He makes me dream. I even bought a T-shirt with the American flag. America is the country where you can make it."
Barack Obama, a biracial man born to a Kenyan father and a white mother, is indeed America's ambassador to the world.
"With Obama, a certain idea of America is back: that of a generous society where equality of opportunity is not an empty promise,'' said an editorial in France's Le Figaro newspaper last summer. "Hope and change, key words of his campaign, reinforce this rediscovered ideal, which resonates as much inside the country as beyond."
And even if he achieves nothing as president -- an unlikely possibility from one so smart and tempered – he will have forever change how blacks see themselves, and how whites and blacks regard each other. And no matter what your politics, surely this is change you can believe in.
