Anything Is Possible

"The
moral arc of universe is long is but it bends towards justice." --
Martin Luther King

It's tempting to be swept up
in the emotion. It was only 50 years ago that black people were being regularly
lynched to the glee of terrorist mobs. Folks like my grandfather --one of
the lucky ones --endured the humiliation of having fellow Navy men look
for his "monkey tail" in the shower.

In what other nation has a member of a
historically-oppressed minority risen to the highest elected office in the
land?

But, as easy as it is to be caught up in the moment,
it's also disorienting. Obama may be a transformational
figure, but he's not transcendent, otherwise we wouldn't
be talking about race --at all.

Culturally, Obama's election changes the race
dynamics equation. But how? Is this progress? As out of touch as it may seem,
one of the Right's favorite black writers, Shelby Steele, author of A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why
He Can't Win, predictably doesn't think so.

In a recent interview, Steele said an Obama presidency
isn't a sign of progress because America has been
"ready" to elect a black person at least since Colin Powell. I
think what he meant was that America
was ready to elect a conservative black
candidate.

Will there be a backlash, as we've seen every
time there's been even a perceived symbolic victory for racial justice?
The Civil War and Reconstruction gave birth to Jim Crow nation. The civil
rights movement was followed by the New Right, which eventually gave rise to
the racially-charged and ruinous reign of the neocons.

The psychologist and philosopher William James once
said (and I'm paraphrasing): most people say they're thinking when,
really, they are only re-arranging their prejudices.

Still, blacks and whites will have to recalibrate their
thoughts about the relationship between race policy and upward mobility. How do
you make the case for affirmative action now?

Although the singular achievement of Obama will
transform how America thinks about race, it doesn't magically erase the
historical inequities of accumulated wealth that have cascaded down the
generations to the present-day, privileging white America with a 200-year
economic head start. To the extent that economic opportunity is largely a
function of who you know and what kind of access you have to financial
resources (loans, family inheritances, etc.), an Obama victory doesn't
change any of that.

Looking beyond race, which is where most of
Obama's supporters have been focusing, there's hope America
can rejoin the international community as a multilateral leader, instead of
trying to unilaterally impose a global empire.

There's hope that torture as official U.S.
policy will end. There's hope real intelligence will mean something in Washington again and the
tide of anti-intellectualism will recede.

There's hope that the prevailing ethos of I've-got-mine-to-hell-with-you-if-you-don't-have-yours
will be eclipsed by an ethic of I-am-my-brother-and-sister's-keeper.

There's hope --not because one man was
elected --but because the election realigns the political establishment,
creating opportunities for us to bring pressure to bear on an Obama
administration to make real change.

There's hope. And while that may seem a trivial
thing to the comfortable, for those afflicted by a sense of hopelessness
it's exactly what the doctor ordered.

It'll be years before the true significance of
Obama can be measured. But this, I'm sure about: when black parents tell
their children "You can be anything you want to be when you grow
up," the parents will really believe it. We won't just be making a
leap of faith. We'll be pointing out the obvious.

It's a tribute to my own parents that they
convinced me I could be anything I wanted long before Obama was on the scene.
It was an outlook nourished in the black Baptist church of my youth, where I
began my spiritual quest in earnest. It was that tradition that introduced me
to theology, where I eventually encountered the writings of Soren Kierkegaard.

His definition of hope has been burned into my soul:
"Hope is the passion for what is possible."

As a father, my job is to instill in my children a
sense of hope and possibility as well as the self-discipline required to turn
dreams into reality. And contrary to the popular myth pedaled by conservatives
--that the core of black culture lives in the victim-hood --me and
millions of other Americans of African-descent come from a long (albeit
imperfect) history of instilling a thirst for achievement in the next
generation.

But now, for the first time, without all the caveats, I
can tell my kids --this is what makes America great: in this country,
anything is possible --and the only constant is change.