The Country is Ready for an American Black President

I was thinking the other day of what this election means to me from a personal perspective, all ideology aside.

From the day Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) announced his candidacy, I’ve always felt the sense of history and what a seminal moment his candidacy represented.

You certainly heard it echoed in the stories that were written, and you see it today in the record turnouts of voters. But even though this election says so much about the past eight years, what went right and what went wrong, and who is better prepared to lead us into the next decade, what is even more pronounced is that this country is ready for an American black to become president.

Think about that for a second. Think about what that means, and the rebuke it sends to every hate-filled organization that tried to foment and stir the bowels of fear and anger.

They have failed. And that is a success for this country. No, it doesn’t mean that racism is dead. But what it does signal is that our institutions of government and service are more sensitive to race, and the stain that hate left on our fabric of society for so long is gradually being wiped away.

We are turning a corner, America. And we as a nation should be proud of that. Republican or Democrat, it doesn’t matter. Those parties’ majorities will ebb and flow for generations. But this moment — here and now — is a testament before God and man of how far we have come on the issue of race — to the point where an American black man can stand as our nation’s leader and not have his skin color the first issue on the minds of the voters.

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton couldn’t do it, for all their flaws and mistakes. On top of that, the country wasn’t ready. But it is today, win or lose. It is today.