Not Just Black and White

The day after the election, I was on the Redline inbound to Braintree. In many ways it was the usual Wednesday afternoon subway crowd: tiny Asian grandmothers clutching shopping bags, girls in leggings lost in their iPod worlds, thirty-somethings in scrubs who got on and off at Charles MGH. But the black passengers seemed changed, somehow. Maybe it was the young black man wearing a shirt of the type that usually has a hip-hop artist plastered across its front, only Tupac’s face was replaced by Barack Obama’s. Or maybe it was the black woman who sat in the seat across from me, beaming when our eyes met. Or maybe it was the word “Obama” that was shouted and whispered and passed from hand to hand down the subway carriage like the watchword we had all been waiting for. We all seemed to walk a little taller, as though we were the ones who had done something to be proud of.

I realize that we have heard more about historic victories and breaking the racial barrier in the past week than we heard about Joe Six-pack in the weeks before the election. In a sense, it does Obama a disservice to celebrate his race—as though the only important thing he ever did was to be black. A weariness that borders on cynicism has settled around the topic of Obama as a black man, especially among those who love Obama for reasons that have nothing to do with his race. Much to the annoyance of non-black Obama supporters, African-Americans seem to have adopted Obama as their exclusive champion.

Although the black community has appropriated Obama as a black hero, this does not mean that he cannot be an American hero as well. The two have been considered mutually exclusive for so long that I am afraid people have begun to believe it. But did the fact that Martin Luther King Jr. was a black hero preclude him from being an American hero? Did his achievements as a man mean something only because he was a black man? Are our goals as Americans really so different that a black hero cannot promote the same values as an American hero?

For many Americans, Obama’s election means a departure from the death and destruction and ignorance of the past eight years. For black Americans, it means a departure from the death and destruction and ignorance of the past several hundred years. We are not as culturally and economically unified a group as non-blacks would like to believe: Some of us are rich and others are poor, some of us are of mixed race, some of us come from other countries, some of us live in the rural South while others live in the urban North. The thing that has really united us is a sense of being shut out from certain opportunities. No matter where we lived or how we behaved, we were all bound by the knowledge that there were things we couldn’t do and places we couldn’t go, all because of the color of our skin. It was a bit like being stuck together in a crowded room with no doors. I cannot say that Barack Obama has let us out of that room, but he has at least opened a skylight and given us all something more in common than centuries of accumulated hatred.

I certainly don’t expect people who aren’t black to know quite what it feels like when you glimpse the world your children will grow up in and realize it will treat them better than it treated you. I do not expect anyone who has not experienced it to understand what it feels like to be frowned at in a high-end store or ogled at by tourists in Harvard Yard surprised to see a black person in a Harvard sweater. I do not expect anyone who has not experienced it to understand what it feels like to be called nigger. Obama’s victory cannot mean the same thing for all Americans. But if there is anything his victory has taught us, it is that we are not such a divided people as we have been told we are for the past eight years. This makes Obama’s victory as a black man special, not just for black Americans, but for all Americans who value equality and hold fast to the idea that we are a better nation than the past has shown us to be.


Marina S. Magloire ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a history and literature concentrator in Kirkland House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.