"For the first time in my adult lifetime I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change."
Michelle Obama, Feb. 18
I always thought I understood what Michelle Obama was trying to say.
You are familiar, of course, with what she did say, which is quoted above. It provided weeks of red meat for her husband's opponents, who took to making ostentatious proclamations of their own unwavering pride in country.
But again, I think I know what the lady meant to say. Namely, that with her husband, this brown-skinned guy with the funny name, making a credible run for the highest office in the land, she could believe, for the first time, that "we the people" included her.
It is, for African-Americans, an intoxicating thought almost too wonderful for thinking. Yet there it is. And here we are: Barack Obama is president-elect of these United States.
In a sense, it is unfair - to him, to us - to make last week's election about race.
Whatever appeal Mr. Obama may have had to African-Americans and white liberals eager to vote for a black candidate is, I believe, dwarfed by his appeal to Americans of all stripes who have simply had enough of the politics of addition by division as practiced by Karl Rove and his disciples - enough of the free-floating anger, the holiday from accountability, the nastiness masquerading as righteousness, the sheer intellectual dishonesty, that have characterized the era of American politics that ends here.
But in the end, after all that, there still is race.
And it would be a sin against our history, a sin against John Lewis and Viola Liuzzo, against James Reeb and Lyndon Johnson, against Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., against all those everyday heroes who marched, bled and died 40 years ago to secure black people's right to vote, not to pause on this pinnacle and savor what it means. It would be a sin against our generations, against slaves and freedmen, against housemen and washerwomen, against porters and domestics, against charred bodies hanging in Southern trees, not to be still and acknowledge that something has happened here, and it is sacred and profound.
For most of the years of the American experiment, "we the people" did not include African-Americans. We were not included in "we." We were not even included in "people."
