Notes on 11/4/08

I admit to doing nothing forensician last night. I sat in my chair and every time a little more of the map got blue I got a little more choked up. When I vote, I always get a little misty eyed at the whole construct we developed a couple of hundred years ago. Our goals and values may have often outstripped our abilities to achieve them, but they have remained guides for what we ought to do, and what we believe we can do. After a most dark period of our history, when small-minded people of limited scope have let our principles fend for themselves, we have turned around and redefined our entire political system by going beyond identity politics, beyond the simplistic binary confines of color, and electing a man of African descent to the White House. And not because he ran in any way as an African-American, but because he was running on a platform beyond race. I am old enough to remember the civil rights battles of the 20th Century. People alive in my lifetime were former slaves in theirs.

One of the great flaws of the founding of this country was its institutionalized belief in slavery, and worse, in the belief that the people it had enslaved were somehow less than others. The greatest challenge this country has faced has been overcoming this flaw. We’ve known the way for a long time, though. For Huck Finn, for example, in one of our most important books, it was no easy choice, but it was the choice Huck had to make once he came to see Jim for what he really was. “All right, then, I’ll GO to hell.” It is no accident that one of the obvious contenders for the Great American Novel is the picaresque story of a runaway kid and a runaway slave. Stories about the growth of America and the American ideal have to be about race if they really seek the truth.

But our success is not going to be some uncomfortable mixing of races and somehow putting up with it. Our success, if it is to come, and I believe that we are seeing it begin, is that race simply doesn’t matter. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Obama did not get elected because he was black, white, green, or polka dotted. He got elected because a lot of people voted for his platform, and his promises for the future. This is the real meaning of this election. It is not about a black man winning, it is about a man winning who happened to be black. Being black just didn’t matter.

That’s the world I want to live in.