The Difference

Tonight, Barack Hussein Obama won the presidency of the United States of America. After spending five hours glued to the television in anticipation of results, I viewed the thousands of people standing at Grant's Park in Chicago to see their new president, the masses cheering in Harlem, in Atlanta, in Times Square - tears, screams and smiles dressing the entire country.

What surprises me most is that on the other coast, my parents were both eagerly watching the same acceptance speech. My parents - who came here in 1990 as immigrants without experiencing the "American dream", who have no U.S. citizenship and who have previously shown no political inclination - tonight they were just as joyous and excited as their four children. Obama's victory tonight, I think, was an attribute to the other side of the U.S. that they had heard about but unfortunately never experienced. That is, the other side of America that does not make one cynical about being an immigrant or minority in this country, but points to hope, optimism, and - finally, tonight - reality.

In one of my earlier blog posts, I had rambled about balancing duty with free will, and finally doubting an individual's ability to break from his own history. History goes something like this:

"We were always playing on the white man's court, Ray had told me, by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, or Kurt, wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn't. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it would because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclination, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self - the humor, the song, the behind-the-back-pass - had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness of your own defeat. And the final irony: should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger."

That was written by Barack Obama more than ten years ago. The same man, who today, tells us this:

"Tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope. For that is the true genius of America - that American can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

Perhaps my parents joined me in my eager and breathless phone conversations tonight because they also recognized that it's not just a country that changes, but people as well and the destinies that are expected of them. Someone commented on Obama's speech saying, "Regardless of what you might believe, we didn't elect a black man to the Presidency tonight. Rather, I submit to you that tonight we elected a man to be President who happens to be black. The difference therein is great and we must never confuse the two." Is it? Is the difference great? Obama didn't grow up in Harlem, nor was he as underprivileged as most African-Americans in this country. But he did recognize a feeling of defeat in his life - a feeling of being black and being put into cages of labels. Tonight, a man broke from the history and future written for him. And tonight, there is no difference between the man the US elected who happens to be black and each person who believed they were destined to be trapped in cages.