1 Boring Old Man

A New Kind of Pride

By Eugene Robinson

Whoever wins this election, I understand what Barack Obama meant when he said his faith in the American people had been "vindicated" by his campaign’s success. I understand what Michelle Obama meant, months ago, when she said she was "proud of my country" for the first time in her adult life. Why should they be immune to the astonishment and vertigo that so many other African Americans are experiencing? Why shouldn’t they have to pinch themselves to make sure they aren’t dreaming, the way that I do?

I know there’s a possibility that the polls are wrong. I know there’s a possibility that white Americans, when push comes to shove, won’t be able to bring themselves to elect a black man as president of the United States. But the spread in the polls is so great that the Bradley effect wouldn’t be enough to make Obama lose; it would take a kind of "Dr. Strangelove effect" in which voters’ hands developed a will of their own.

I’m being facetious but not unserious. In my gut, I know there’s a chance that the first African American to make a serious run for the presidency will lose. But that is precisely what’s new and, in a sense, unsettling: I’m talking about possibility, not inevitability. For African Americans, at least those of us old enough to have lived through the civil rights movement, this is nothing short of mind-blowing. It’s disorienting, and it makes me see this nation in a different light.

You see, I remember a time of separate and unequal schools, restrooms and water fountains – a time when black people were officially second-class citizens. I remember moments when African Americans were hopeful and excited about the political process, and I remember other moments when most of us were depressed and disillusioned. But I can’t think of a single moment, before this year, when I thought it was within the realm of remote possibility that a black man could be nominated for president by one of the major parties – let alone that he would go into Election Day with a better-than-even chance of winning…

It was a time like now. And people died then too, in Viet Nam, and on the streets – Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. Very wrong people got elected – Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew. We had riots and Martial Law, tanks in the streets. It was chaos, and our friends from New Jersey and a few others were precious to us. After training, we all had to go into the service. They were in Italy and we were in England. And then we all grew up and went about our lives, voting against the Nixon, Reagan, Bush’s, but no longer in an enclave in a historic time. I guess we merged into the aging 60’s liberal set that populated the intown City neighborhoods around the country.

My reactivation as a politically active person wasn’t about Civil Rights. It was about realizing that we had been duped into living in a fascist nation. But writing this reminds me that even as an old white guy who grew up in the segregated and racist South, I feel what Eugene Robinson feels. Pinch me! Barack Obama is a black American! In the intervening years, I’ve lamented how slow the assimilation of the races moves. My thirty something daughter’s world is much more integrated than mine, and I expect it’s even greater in the younger age groups. But I’d settled my mind that it would not be in my lifetime that I would see what we all wanted back in the Salad Days forty years ago. And yet, here I sit with my fingers crossed for the election of a black President – and not just any black President. Barack Obama is the most qualified person on the scene to take over this sinking flagship and try to whip us into being seaworthy again.