In the wake of the inauguration of President Obama, people of all political stripes and races exult in the potential of U.S. democracy to look past its racism-drenched history.  Out of pride in our first African-American president, our first multiracial president, and our first president to have been raised partially in Asia, we may presume progressive policies will ensue.  Yet we should fear renewed criticism of affirmative action laws, now by minorities who deserve its benefits but refuse them as a sign of moral character.   This isn’t Clarence Thomas, who benefited from affirmative action and then criticized it.  His hypocrisy discredited his arguments.  Instead, we have two racialized individuals, one fictional, one real – each demonstrating their moral grounding by rejecting the benefits of affirmative action. 

Enter Ugly Betty’s own repudiation of an affirmative action benefits.  Ugly Betty, the television show about a conventionally unattractive and awkwardly-dressed Latina who works as an assistant in a fashion magazine, often explores challenging issues of race, culture and gay identity.   Here its oversimplification of affirmative action betrays this reputation.  In an episode that aired this fall, Betty (America Ferrera) competed with a gay colleague Mark (Michael Urie) for a prized editorial training program.  Despite Mark’s unmistakably superior application, Betty wins the internship.  She is elated until Mark tells her she got it so that the organization can “fill its quota.”  Enfuriated, Betty acts.  She withdraws her application after the organization refuses to deny that affirmative action played a role in the decision.  Betty’s father, a once undocumented immigrant from Mexico, urges her to take the offer as appropriate in light of his own experiences at the brunt of racial discrimination.  All is saved when the deus ex machina, here embodied by Betty’s sexy straight white boss Daniel (Eric Mabius), saves Betty’s application by a long recommendation.   Both successful, Betty and Mark bond at the end of the show. 

Indeed, Betty’s tale echoes a leitmotif of the presidential campaign.  In now President Obama’s application to Harvard, he did not declare himself “African American” on the application.  Setting aside his choice then, the meaning of it now is to weave the story of Obama’s integrity through his refusal to benefit from affirmative action.  For affirmative action opponents, his achievements without affirmative action demonstrate true grit.  Here is a black man who refuses to play the “race card” to profit from his identity.  As many scholars of race have pointed out, minority individuals must overachieve to attain legitimacy in a world beset by discriminatory undertones.  Perhaps he left his name off and assumed that his name signaled diverse origin, assisting him without his labeling himself as a minority applicant.  Regardless, President Obama’s refusal reads as a sign of an act to be read as integrity.  This raises a bigger threat to progressive hopes for Obama: he will face pressure to overlook racial equality issues to demonstrate that he’s a president for all.    

What does all of this say about affirmative action law?  Cultural depictions of minorities with less deserving applications who benefit from affirmative action lob several attacks at the policy.   Affirmative action morphs from diversity policy into a threat to equal opportunity, by which deserving whites and others fail and unqualified minorities succeed.  Naturally, the response for whites and some people of color is to resent the program and to respect only those minorities who refuse its fruits.  As long as beneficiaries face the perception that they are less qualified, minorities will feel pressure to shun affirmative action.

I never felt that pressure although my own Ivy-League admission hinged on proto-affirmative action.   In 1987, when I applied, my college essay described coming out as gay and my goals for equality.   I wrote it despite the potential for discrimination – back then only a few schools explicitly barred sexual orientation discrimination.  When visiting school after my admission, I met the admissions officers who handled my application.  They not only remembered my application but also complimented my bravery.  Perhaps my admission did not solely draw on my identity, but what I did with my identity.   Regardless, I did not flinch – it struck me as just given the constant bullying and occasional beatings I had survived in high school.

Betty may not think of herself as a victim of discrimination, but she is, at least by the patent collateral effects of her father’s experiences.  President Obama too.  Diminishing racism may have allowed President Obama’s victory, but racism certainly lives in the electorate.  More broadly speaking, racial and gender inequality undeniably persists, necessitating some public policy favoring affirmative action laws and diversity efforts by the public and private sectors.  Although individuals of racialized minorities cannot be expected to all line up behind affirmative action, it is indeed unfortunate that for our heroine Betty, and indeed for our new President, saying “no” to affirmative action proves the ultimate key to white approval.   Let us hope this is merely a storyline and not a misguided compass for public policy

Are Attorney General Eric Holder’s poignant and honest remarks at the DOJ Black History Month Program the beginning of a real racial conversation in the United States?  Read his remarks below.

Every year, in February, we attempt to recognize and to appreciate black history. It is a worthwhile endeavor for the contributions of African Americans to this great nation are numerous and significant. Even as we fight a war against terrorism, deal with the reality of electing an African American as our President for the first time and deal with the other significant issues of the day, the need to confront our racial past, and our racial present, and to understand the history of African people in this country, endures. One cannot truly understand America without understanding the historical experience of black people in this nation. Simply put, to get to the heart of this country one must examine its racial soul.

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race related issues continue to occupy a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and given our nation’s history this is in some ways understandable. And yet, if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us. But we must do more- and we in this room bear a special responsibility. Through its work and through its example this Department of Justice, as long as I am here, must - and will - lead the nation to the “new birth of freedom” so long ago promised by our greatest President. This is our duty and our solemn obligation.

We commemorated five years ago, the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. And though the world in which we now live is fundamentally different than that which existed then, this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse future it is fated to have. To our detriment, this is typical of the way in which this nation deals with issues of race. And so I would suggest that we use February of every year to not only commemorate black history but also to foster a period of dialogue among the races. This is admittedly an artificial device to generate discussion that should come more naturally, but our history is such that we must find ways to force ourselves to confront that which we have become expert at avoiding.

As a nation we have done a pretty good job in melding the races in the workplace. We work with one another, lunch together and, when the event is at the workplace during work hours or shortly thereafter, we socialize with one another fairly well, irrespective of race. And yet even this interaction operates within certain limitations. We know, by “American instinct” and by learned behavior, that certain subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks, at best embarrassment, and, at worst, the questioning of one’s character. And outside the workplace the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some fifty years ago. This is truly sad. Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated.

As a nation we should use Black History month as a means to deal with this continuing problem. By creating what will admittedly be, at first, artificial opportunities to engage one another we can hasten the day when the dream of individual, character based, acceptance can actually be realized. To respect one another we must have a basic understanding of one another. And so we should use events such as this to not only learn more about the facts of black history but also to learn more about each other. This will be, at first, a process that is both awkward and painful but the rewards are potentially great. The alternative is to allow to continue the polite, restrained mixing that now passes as meaningful interaction but that accomplishes little. Imagine if you will situations where people- regardless of their skin color- could confront racial issues freely and without fear. The potential of this country, that is becoming increasingly diverse, would be greatly enhanced. I fear however, that we are taking steps that, rather than advancing us as a nation are actually dividing us even further. We still speak too much of “them” and not “us”. There can, for instance, be very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action. This debate can, and should, be nuanced, principled and spirited. But the conversation that we now engage in as a nation on this and other racial subjects is too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own, narrow self interest. Our history has demonstrated that the vast majority of Americans are uncomfortable with, and would like to not have to deal with, racial matters and that is why those, black or white, elected or self-appointed, who promise relief in easy, quick solutions, no matter how divisive, are embraced. We are then free to retreat to our race protected cocoons where much is comfortable and where progress is not really made. If we allow this attitude to persist in the face of the most significant demographic changes that this nation has ever confronted- and remember, there will be no majority race in America in about fifty years- the coming diversity that could be such a powerful, positive force will, instead, become a reason for stagnation and polarization. We cannot allow this to happen and one way to prevent such an unwelcome outcome is to engage one another more routinely- and to do so now.

As I indicated before, the artificial device that is Black History month is a perfect vehicle for the beginnings of such a dialogue. And so I urge all of you to use the opportunity of this month to talk with your friends and co-workers on the other side of the divide about racial matters. In this way we can hasten the day when we truly become one America.

It is also clear that if we are to better understand one another the study of black history is essential because the history of black America and the history of this nation are inextricably tied to each other. It is for this reason that the study of black history is important to everyone- black or white. For example, the history of the United States in the nineteenth century revolves around a resolution of the question of how America was going to deal with its black inhabitants. The great debates of that era and the war that was ultimately fought are all centered around the issue of, initially, slavery and then the reconstruction of the vanquished region. A dominant domestic issue throughout the twentieth century was, again, America’s treatment of its black citizens. The civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s changed America in truly fundamental ways. Americans of all colors were forced to examine basic beliefs and long held views. Even so, most people, who are not conversant with history, still do not really comprehend the way in which that movement transformed America. In racial terms the country that existed before the civil rights struggle is almost unrecognizable to us today. Separate public facilities, separate entrances, poll taxes, legal discrimination, forced labor, in essence an American apartheid, all were part of an America that the movement destroyed. To attend her state’s taxpayer supported college in 1963 my late sister in law had to be escorted to class by United States Marshals and past the state’s governor, George Wallace. That frightening reality seems almost unthinkable to us now. The civil rights movement made America, if not perfect, better.

In addition, the other major social movements of the latter half of the twentieth century- feminism, the nation’s treatment of other minority groups, even the anti-war effort- were all tied in some way to the spirit that was set free by the quest for African American equality. Those other movements may have occurred in the absence of the civil rights struggle but the fight for black equality came first and helped to shape the way in which other groups of people came to think of themselves and to raise their desire for equal treatment. Further, many of the tactics that were used by these other groups were developed in the civil rights movement.

And today the link between the black experience and this country is still evident. While the problems that continue to afflict the black community may be more severe, they are an indication of where the rest of the nation may be if corrective measures are not taken. Our inner cities are still too conversant with crime but the level of fear generated by that crime, now found in once quiet, and now electronically padlocked suburbs is alarming and further demonstrates that our past, present and future are linked. It is not safe for this nation to assume that the unaddressed social problems in the poorest parts of our country can be isolated and will not ultimately affect the larger society.

Black history is extremely important because it is American history. Given this, it is in some ways sad that there is a need for a black history month. Though we are all enlarged by our study and knowledge of the roles played by blacks in American history, and though there is a crying need for all of us to know and acknowledge the contributions of black America, a black history month is a testament to the problem that has afflicted blacks throughout our stay in this country. Black history is given a separate, and clearly not equal, treatment by our society in general and by our educational institutions in particular. As a former American history major I am struck by the fact that such a major part of our national story has been divorced from the whole. In law, culture, science, athletics, industry and other fields, knowledge of the roles played by blacks is critical to an understanding of the American experiment. For too long we have been too willing to segregate the study of black history. There is clearly a need at present for a device that focuses the attention of the country on the study of the history of its black citizens. But we must endeavor to integrate black history into our culture and into our curriculums in ways in which it has never occurred before so that the study of black history, and a recognition of the contributions of black Americans, become commonplace. Until that time, Black History Month must remain an important, vital concept. But we have to recognize that until black history is included in the standard curriculum in our schools and becomes a regular part of all our lives, it will be viewed as a novelty, relatively unimportant and not as weighty as so called “real” American history.

I, like many in my generation, have been fortunate in my life and have had a great number of wonderful opportunities. Some may consider me to be a part of black history. But we do a great disservice to the concept of black history recognition if we fail to understand that any success that I have had, cannot be viewed in isolation. I stood, and stand, on the shoulders of many other black Americans. Admittedly, the identities of some of these people, through the passage of time, have become lost to us- the men, and women, who labored long in fields, who were later legally and systemically discriminated against, who were lynched by the hundreds in the century just past and those others who have been too long denied the fruits of our great American culture. The names of too many of these people, these heroes and heroines, are lost to us. But the names of others of these people should strike a resonant chord in the historical ear of all in our nation: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Charles Drew, Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Vivian Malone, Rosa Parks, Marion Anderson, Emmit Till. These are just some of the people who should be generally recognized and are just some of the people to whom all of us, black and white, owe such a debt of gratitude. It is on their broad shoulders that I stand as I hope that others will some day stand on my more narrow ones.

Black history is a subject worthy of study by all our nation’s people. Blacks have played a unique, productive role in the development of America. Perhaps the greatest strength of the United States is the diversity of its people and to truly understand this country one must have knowledge of its constituent parts. But an unstudied, not discussed and ultimately misunderstood diversity can become a divisive force. An appreciation of the unique black past, acquired through the study of black history, will help lead to understanding and true compassion in the present, where it is still so sorely needed, and to a future where all of our people are truly valued.

Thank you.

     Conservative commentator Bill Bennett famously (and arrogantly) summed up the significance of Barack Obama’s win last November as the end of “excuses” for blacks.  Although Bennett, as a white right-wing talking head prone to inflammatory racial commentary may have been an inappropriate and certainly ill-timed messenger of this bromide, his statement was not far off from what many black people have been saying among our family members, and in our community centers and churches since November.  Days after the election a black analyst in the Washington Post seemed to unconsciously parrot Bennett when she declared that, “African-Americans just entered the ��no-excuses’ zone.”  Black comics joked that blacks could no longer claim that we are being held back by “the man,” when with a black man in the White House we technically are “the man.”  The widely accepted understanding of this sentiment is that traditional black civil rights thinking – which focuses on dismantling systematic racial inequity as the principal means of improving the economic, educational and social condition of African Americans – has been rendered obsolete by Obama’s presidency.

       But in the months since Obama’s election, little attention has been directed at the possibility that Obama’s ascension has thrown another traditional black school of thought into potential obsolescence:  black conservatism.    I’ve been fascinated by the dearth of statements by black conservatives (and the directionless rambling of the few that have offered some reflections) on the meaning of the Obama presidency.  I speak of course of Ward Connerly, Justice Clarence Thomas and Shelby Steele, among others – those who, as Chris Rock bitingly put it years ago, have “devoted their lives to making sure the white man gets a break.”  I began thinking of Obama’s presidency as a blow to black conservatives when I was on the Mall on Inauguration Day.  I was surprised that when Justice Thomas appeared on the screen of the jumbotron, taking his place along with other Supreme Court justices on the dais, he elicited nary a boo, a hiss or even a sarcastic comment from the normally vocal liberal crowd around me.  It was as though Obama’s inauguration was, in and of itself, answer to all of Thomas’ tirades against affirmative action. 

    Because whatever you think of the merits going forward of affirmative action, and other traditional civil rights strategies, there can be no doubt that Obama’s presidency would not have been possible without the successes and groundwork laid by those earlier efforts.  In fact, the election of Barack Obama as president is, in many ways, the ultimate vindication of the Civil Rights Movement.  Neither the legal marriage of his parents in 50 states, nor the ability of Obama and his wife to attend Ivy League schools,  or to live in their tony Chicago neighborhood, or Obama’s ability to garner white votes, would be possible without the civil rights struggles that brought us the desegregation of universities and K-12 schools, the end of racially restrictive housing covenants, the abolition of anti-miscegenation laws, and the crown jewel of the civil rights movement – the Voting Rights Act.  And the list goes on and on – all brought to us by the activism and litigation of civil rights icons regularly derided by black conservatives.  The ironic piece de la resistance, of course, is the 1984 and 1988 breakthrough presidential runs of Jesse Jackson – one of the leaders Justice Thomas was presumably referring to when he once derided civil rights activists who just “bitch and moan and whine.”  Jackson’s transcendent run in ’84 and especially in ’88 literally prepared the ground which ultimately bore the fruit of Obama’s win, demonstrating the power of grassroots organizing in a presidential primary run, and accustoming white voters to the possibility of a black president.    

            It’s an interesting conundrum for black conservatives.   President Obama is a hard leader to caricature.  He speaks of personal responsibility often, and he’s no liberal.  But his full embrace of an African American identity, his start as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer on the Southside of Chicago, his extraordinary race speech in Philadelphia last year – even his beautiful and proud black wife, his passionate ballplaying and his embrace by and of hip/hop stars, collectively represent a challenge to black conservatives who have made their meat and potatoes pigeonholing civil rights lawyers as hustlers and who have worn their status as outsiders from the mainstream black community as a badge of honor, and a mark of intellectual independence.

        I suspect that the challenge for black conservatives is deeply personal as well.  Over the past year Obama’s walk has demonstrated, for example, that the “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks” that Justice Thomas revisited in his bitter memoir last year may be a thing of the mind, and that a cool confidence in your own integrity is a better response to the slings and arrows that come against you, than a white-lipped tirade against your detractors.  If the rabble-rousing, rhyming of Jesse seems a bit passé, then certainly the affirmative action –obsessed, civil rights bashing of Ward and Clarence and Shelby is also out-of-touch.   Maybe that’s why Shelby Steele’s post-election commentary has seemed to reek of sour grapes and impotent frustration at what he calls the “national obsession” with the racial significance of Obama’s win.  In fact, Dr. Steele sounds uncomfortably close to his left doppelgangers when he warns that Obama’s win will not lead us into “true post-racialism.”  So what does black conservatism offer us now, and who is prepared to make a compelling case for the continued relevance of black conservative thought?  Newly-elected Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele’s (no relation to Shelby) incoherent debut demonstrates that he’s not up to the task of becoming the political pop culture carrier for the kind of intellectual vision of personal responsibility, limited government and self-reliance touted by Thomas, et al.

        Yes, it’s “no excuses” time for blacks – those on the left and on the right.  But civil rights leaders can at least boast that President Obama is their movement grandchild, even as they are challenged to recalibrate their goals and strategies in light of Obama’s success.  Black conservatives must struggle even harder to assert their continued relevance, and have very little to show for their decades of resistance to the very activism that made Obama’s presidency possible.

Just when you thought that it could not get worse, it has.  The economy is continuing, resulting in significant losses for educational institutions.  

Tenured as well as untenured faculty members at Clark Atlanta University have been laid off.  The layoffs occurred despite other proposals for saving money by a group of faculty leaders, including one proposal to cut salaries by 10% across the board.

O.J. Simpson gets sentenced today for the bone headed act of leading a group of men, at least one of whom had a gun, into a hotel room to steal some sports memorabilia.  His exposure ranges from six years to life imprisonment. Here’s hoping the judge does not throw the book at him.

Simpson has been, for many African-Americans, a complicated symbol of the rule of law.  Charged with a brutal crime of violence against a white woman and man, Simpson had a trial.  Not so long ago in the United States of America, he  might have been lynched, just on the accusation.  Then, despite some evidence that he committed the crime, the jury acquitted him, largely because of an inept prosecution that relied too much on the testimony of a lying, racist police officer.  Some of the jurors believed that Simpson was “probably” guilty, but correctly understood that “probably” does not reach the “beyond reasonable doubt” threshold required for a criminal conviction. 

You know the rest.  Black glee, white fury, racial divide yadda yadda yadda.  There was a sense among many African Americans that we won something, not “won” in the euphoric-still-can-make-me-cry-when-I-think-about-it sense of the Obama victory (which, for the record, most white voters also did not support), but won in an angrier, uglier,  more visceral way.  Not only didn’t O.J. get lynched for a notorious crime against a white woman, he actually got away with it, based on the law.  “Rules are rules,” the expression goes.  “All we want,” Martin Luther King said, “is what you put on paper.”

It was never about Simpson, thank God, because the one thing the races can agree on is that he is an idiot.  He didn’t have the grace to retire to Florida and live the quiet life of a symbol-of-the- rule-of-law.  He messed up, again. Still, in the realm of what criminals do, Simpson’s act was medium bad, not a minor offense, but far from a horrific one.   If he is punished too much, it will feel to some African-Americans like the night riders, better late than never, came for him after all.

     I was thrilled to learn this week that law professor Annette Gordon-Reed is the winner of the 2008 National Book Award for non-fiction for her work, The Hemingses of Monticello:  An American Family. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/books/20awards.html?scp=2&sq=Annette%20Gordon-Reed&st=cse This book is the second treatment in Gordon-Reed’s exhaustive and authoritative research on the relationship between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, with whom he most certainly had a long sexual relationship and several children.  The real story here is that Gordon-Reed’s first book on the Jefferson/Hemings alliance, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:  An American Controversy, was every bit as excellent as The Hemingses.  When it was published though, the historian-keepers of Jefferson’s sanitized history were not yet ready to accept Reeds findings and conclusions, and – as a particularly trenchant review of Gordon-Reed’s book in September’s New Yorker explores — were in fact affirmatively unwilling to take the logical analytical steps routinely used in historical research to come to the conclusions that Gordon-Reed does in her work.  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/09/22/080922crbo_books_lepore  In the same year that Gordon-Reed’s first book was published, the National Book Award was bestowed on Joseph Ellis for his biography of Jefferson, American Sphinx:  The Character of Thomas Jefferson, in which as The New Yorker article points out, Ellis rules out the possibility that Jefferson had an affair with Hemings. It took DNA research published a year later to make deniers of a Hemings/Jefferson sexual relationship finally let go of this view (although many continued to insist that Jefferson never fathered a child with Hemings).

  As the New Yorker article suggests, it shouldn’t have taken DNA evidence to prove the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings.  DNA evidence is a fairly recent scientific advancement  — at least in the hands of historians.  For hundreds of years historians have used documentary evidence, historical context, oral history and good old fashioned logic and good sense to piece together what we call “history.”   Gordon-Reed’s triumph in winning the National Book Award vindicates the tremendous energy, and intellectual power she’s put into her work on the Hemingses and Jefferson.  But it also vindicates the tools of good old fashioned historical research and work in the hands of a skilled legal historian who is unafraid to confront and explore the harsh realities of racism and slavery in the lives of the men who (and women) created this nation.

       In any case, congratulations to Professor Gordon-Reed.

Cross posted at Blacksmythe.

Cross posted at blacksmythe.

The powerhouse credit card company, American Express has just joined the storied list of financial firms converting to bank holding companies.  Like Merrill Lynch and Salomon Brothers, American Express is seeking shelter from the subprime storm by converting to the highly regulated Bank Holding Company form.  In another economic climate, these voluntary conversions  from the largely unregulated corporate forms that shape credit card companies and the minimally regulated and often wild, risk seeking investment bank culture would be inexplicable.

Today, the reason for the conversions are obvious, its all about the Benjamins.  Yes, access to large amounts of cold cash from customer deposits, and low-cost borrowing at the discount window offered by the Federal Reserve can turn even firms that have an allergy to government regulation into believers in the benefits of regulatory oversight.

How should taxpayers and bank customers view this growing trend of corporate category-hopping ?  The irony of this flight to regulation is not lost on us consumers who have weathered the voracious appetite of credit card companies to solicit our business and then treat us like red headed step-children, with sharply escalating teaser rates, universal default rules, industry opposition to bankruptcy protection for consumers choking on a suffocating pile of huge interest costs from high interest rates that never seem to go down with other interest rates.  Add to this the confusing minimum payment rules and a foul brew of penalty fees that pile up for the unwary to create balances that balloon far beyond the amount of the original debt.

There is a word for what I am feeling about American Express’ flight to regulation: Schadenfreund, or comeuppance.  The stress and worry that the highly compensated executives of American Express, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch are experiencing in this crisis can’t be half as bad as the customers of these financial giants who were trammeled by high interest rates, risky investment strategies and huge compensation packages for executives who cooked up the products that caused us all so much financial pain. Like my mother used to say: “what goes around, comes around.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/emma-coleman-jordan/diving-for-dollars-and-th_b_144012.html

This reflection is personal. I voted this morning at my assigned precinct. Though having the option, I just could not bring myself to register to vote by mail. I wanted to make that walk. I wanted to create for myself a complete sense-memory of what I was doing today. An imagined reality transformed into a reality I never could have imagined. An African-American President.

I wanted to have and hold everything about this day. The time I woke up (5:30). What I wore (stone cordorouys). The embrace between me and my partner, anticipating history being made. The rain (light). The direction of the wind (coming at my right side). The color of the leaves (bright yellow). St. Patrick’s Church. The number of people at the precinct voting. The man who brought his barely six year old son along, and explained everything to him.

I made that walk for myself, but given the profound significance of this election, I wanted to walk to honor those whose sacrifices made this day possible for me in my lifetime, including my mom and dad.

I went to the booth, and did my thing. Walking away, my eyes started welling up. I could not experience this day without regard to my own history, and the history of my parents and fore-parents. As a 45 year-old African-American who grew up in northeastern Ohio, my young years were during the tail end of the modern civil rights movement. Straddling that movement, like-minded others in my generation were educated about the struggle through books, and absorbed the experiences of older siblings, grandparents and of course, parents. My parents, both now 71 years young, were born and raised just outside of Montgomery, Alabama. And like many African-Americans of the post-war generation, my parents moved North to make a better life for themselves, their children and, to some degree, to protect us from seeing the things they had seen.

My parents, and their parents, brothers, and sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins, endured that unique brand of Southern racism. Jim Crow segregation. Sharecroppers on land that could never be theirs. A few were victims of the most infamous “experiment” in U.S. medical history. For myself, my first encounter with that brand occurred when I was five, during one of our many sojourns back to Alabama. At a gas station to refuel, I remember my uncle being chased out of a gas station by a man with a shotgun, my uncle yelling at my dad to “drive! drive!” as my uncle ran to his car and his family, and then gunshots as we sped off, and as a bunch of sons and daughters, nieces and nephews cried out of fear and confusion.  It was years later when my dad fleshed out that day for me: a hamlet in Tennessee, a gas station owner who apparently didn’t give a damn about the memo announcing the death of Jim Crow, my uncle having the unmitigated gall to walk through the “wrong” door to pay for his gas, and who never let someone call him a “nigger.”

Lord. The racism my parents saw, heard, smelled. My parents’ experiences left them with scars of cynicism, anger, fear and loathing. But the scars are nowhere near the surface of their skin. They never let those scars left by bigotry and discrimination keep them from demonstrating love, compassion, and humanity towards all.  Most importantly, they lived and loved in ways that ensured their children would not inherit those scars.

This election season, my folks let me see their scars. Dread: “I don’t want Obama to run because someone is surely going to assassinate him.” Cynicism: “White folks will never vote for a Black man for President.”   Fear: “Look what happened to Martin, Malcolm, Robert.”  There was a reluctance to hope because those scars remind them that on a dime, hopes can be dashed. There was a reluctance to jump for joy or shout in victory when Obama sealed the nomination because they know full well what evils some are capable of. The belief persisted that there are not enough whites of great meaning and will to unite to defend against those who represent our worst prejudices.

So after I left the voting precinct, all of these thoughts coursed through me. I thought about my parents, and called them. I wanted to hear what they thought about this day, this possibility, given all they have seen. Given all they might have ever hoped for but still believed, in their marrow, they would never see: an African-American as President of the United States. My mom: “I can’t describe it.” My dad: “Mmmh.”

No jumps for joy. No shouts of victory. But my parents are exhaling, and that’s just as fine with me. The election results haven’t even been tabulated yet, but I am already walking on air. And so are they.