I keep grinning at Black people.
This is embarrassing. It has got to stop.
I was poll monitoring here in an elementary school cafeteria in Vegas. It was an exceedingly boring day in a mostly Republican area, heavily white. Turnout was not all that heavy. Maybe the Republicans had given up; maybe Early Voting having sucked up most of the electorate. I polished off several more chapters in "The Shock Doctrine" and occasionally snuck out for radio reports like guiltily-puffed cigarettes. At one point, a Black woman in a wheelchair who must have been at least eighty was pushed in by her no-less-than-50-year-old daughter. We are not supposed to talk to voters while in the building. The rules say nothing about grinning. So I grinned. I had an overwhelming and inappropriate urge to congratulate her, like her grandson was getting married. I suppressed that. But, I ambled out of the cafeteria as the old woman was leaving, sidled up next to this complete stranger to me, and said sotto voce, "thank you for voting." She patted my hand and smiled. She has probably dealt with worse than this before.
When I was done, I drove to a fast food restaurant I had haunted while campaigning here in 2006. There were several Black people there. Each time I saw one, I realized a few seconds later that I was grinning broadly at them.
This is weird. This is strange white liberal behavior. I know it. Why am I doing this?
I then drove to the Rio Hotel and Casino where the Democratic victory party was being held. I made it through traffic and finally parked just as Obama was preparing to give his speech. I reclined my seat and closed my eyes and listened. I knew that I would see it with the visuals later. Just this one time, just this first time, I wanted to hear it on the radio, like it was a broadcast from FDR.
I walked what seemed like a mile from parking structure through nerve-jangling casino to convention center. Boisterous young Black men were screaming "Ohh-Bahhhh-Mahhhhh!" down the corridors and whooping. I grinned at each of them. Like a fool, I grinned. Black women were decked out in Obama fashion -- t-shirts, pins, hats, purses, scarves, fingernails all plastered with Obamiana. It was glorious. Involuntarily, I grinned. The younger ones withstood it; the older ones seemed to appreciate it.
A Black man, maybe 25, strutted down the hallway high-fiving everyone. I stepped up and slapped hands. This is not how I am. More people came, black and white, waving signs like kabuki pom-poms. I grinned and waved back and grinned some more.
Barack Obama -- not for the first time and not for the last time -- was wrong about something in his speech tonight. He said that the people who for so long did not believe that this could happen -- leaving out of his sentence an explcit statement that the referent was "that we could elect a Black man as President" -- were cynics. No, we were not cynics, Barack. We were realists. We were realists like your wife, who could never fully -- she had left out the word "fully" when she said this, which was a shame because it was the key word in her statement -- be proud of her country because -- and she also left this unsaid -- it appeared that it could never really elect a Black man as President. That unwillingness to honor the pledge made to schoolchildren than anyone could grow up to be President -- it was that that prevented any thinking and feeling human being from being fully proud of America.
We were not cynics, Barack. It was a false promise and we knew it and we hated it and everyone else seemed to know it but you. We took no grim pleasure in these beliefs that our society was not prepared to treat you equally. Your wife, the Black voters of South Carolina prior to Iowa, me, my father, so many in the netroots, we were right about this -- at the time. And then, thanks to you and those who believed in you, we were proven wrong. We had not been wrong in our assessment of reality; we were refuted only because reality itself had changed. It had become possible, become conceivable, that we could be fully proud of our country.
And so I could not stop myself from grinning every time I saw a Black person as I walked through the Rio, because for the first time -- signed, sealed, and now finally delivered -- every one I saw was a potential future President. And that goes for women and gays and Jews and Hindus and someday -- someday no doubt unexpected -- for Muslims and atheists as well.
I reject the notion that this election means that we are now past "race" as a social issue or social problem. You may again call me a cynic; I still call myself a realist. A study of baseball teams, decades after Jackie Robinson, once showed that a star player was propotionally equally likely to be of any race. Talent dominated all; a star could be of any color. It was the marginal players -- the utility infielders, the long relievers, the backup catchers -- who were disproportionately white.
So it is with you, President-elect Obama. What we have proven is that we have gotten to the point in our political culture where, when given a choice between Willie Mays and a .250 hitter, voters are now willing to pick Willie Mays for their team. That represents a serious advance over what came before; it is nothing to sneeze at. But true equality comes when someone does not have to be as spectacular as Barack Obama to receive equal treatment regardless of race. We're not there yet. But today we have come closer to that day.
We can as a society, at least under ideal circumstances and in time of dire need, transcend our bone-bred prejudice and judge a potential leader by the content of his character and by the caliber of his capability. Your successes in office -- like those of Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays and Larry Doby and Bob Gibson and Frank Robinson and Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente in baseball (look up the ones you don't know, kids) -- will propel us further towards color-blindness, even if that end is still far on the horizon, even if we never get there.
But for now we know that we have taken a critical step: we have shown that race is not necessarily an obstacle to one's becoming President. By the way, I don't like all this talk of your being the first Black President; it undersells your accomplishment and your significance. In what we used to call the "First World" -- modern Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Japan -- no country has, to my knowledge, been led in modern times by a person substantially of Black African origin. It is now possible to imagine a Black Bahamian Prime Minister of England, a Black Guadaloupian Prime Minister of France. You are not merely going to be the first Black President; you are the first Black leader of any nation in what we sometimes call the industrialized world. We won't fully realize the barriers you have broken until we reach out to keep ourselves from bumping into them and find that they are no longer there.
And so I find myself today, each time too late to suppress it, grinning when I see Black people. I am grinning inappropriately at strangers who have no reason to accept with equanimity being the trigger for a middle-aged stranger's newborn delight. I know that this unsolicited intimacy, this being beamed at, is a bit rude. And so I stop myself. I walk a few yards further along, see another Black person, and find myself grinning again.
Then again, what the hell. After all, today they are grinning back.