Nature of America

Okay, so the man of the decade, if not the century, has been elected to the presidency of the U.S. and all seems right with the universe. Balance is restored, the planets are all lined up and overnight America became the land of equality and purist magnanimity due to "Obama, the melioration of the culture."

The Nation reports that in Europe, Obama is the kind of American that is loved..."His is the America of jazz and Fitzgerald and Faulkner; the quintessential "cool cat" who can garner the cause of multiethnicity, the perfect culturally blended man for the ages. But amid the shouts of jubilation that herald the arrival of an Obama presidency, we must remember that he is only one man and still an elected favorite of only half of the U.S. electorate.

An Obama presidency will not erase the concept of racism in this country overnight, even if his presidency gains two terms. Such things will not be possible until a national agenda is defined that does not look at race, creed, color, or gender as a caveat of electoral tangents. One of the ironies of history in this country is a question of whether any person of color other than an African American would receive the same Democratic Party support as Obama, or was a Black man the safer bet of all racial minorities because, as a country, we understand Black people better?

Racism in this country is an omnipresent part of its national heritage, and one must take care to not allow the election of such an historic figure to cause us to let our guard down and say, "everything's going to be all right!" If anything, we must be even more watchful, reminding ourselves that the very tools that made Obama's presidency possible (the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts) must still be periodically renewed to have the force of law in this country.

We must remember that the very same amendment that ended slavery for some in this country, reclassified that very same condition for others in the same sentence.

We must remember that the concept of states' rights versus federal authority, the very same condition that helped to spark a civil war in this country, still exists with a passion and we must take care that we insure that the forward strides that allowed for the election of Obama in the so-called blue states, continues and grows.

It's about the grassroots precepts that propelled Obama, the unlikely multicultural phenom, to Obama, President-elect of the United States of America.

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