Scott Bremner

It’s not until I see the extraordinary depth of emotion coming out of many in the black community this week that I realize both how historic this election is and how different our paths have been.

Sure, on its face I can understand that electing the country’s first African-American president would be a big deal for people who thought the divide too great to cross in a single lifetime.

I can see the victory as another step in a long slow process of acceptance, of equal opportunity and eventual color blindness.

But when I see the eyes filled with tears and the voices unable to speak, filled with a joy that borders on utter disbelief, it’s clear that my understanding barely scratches the surface.

Simply put, many feel the system has always been rigged against them, that the courts, the jobs and the political clout have all been controlled by people of another color.

More blacks go to jail than whites for similar crimes?

No kidding.

Votes in Florida are suddenly disqualified in 2000 in predominantly minority precincts?

No surprise.

When millions of hurricane relief dollars flow into Louisiana but manage to miss the largely black devastated neighborhoods?

What else is new?

Somehow America would never let a guy named Barack Obama go all the way.

After all, it is called the “White” House.

This is a people who had to march on Washington just to get the same civil rights other citizens took for granted.

Some aren’t sure from exactly where their family originates, having been removed by force without documents for the stoop labor of a new land.

Just a few short decades ago the barriers were everywhere: Don’t eat at that restaurant.
Don’t drink from that fountain. Don’t go to that University. Don’t sit in that bus seat.

The truth is that I can’t imagine what it must feel like as an African-American who has been through all that to look at Barack Obama’s acceptance speech.

To see that face and realize, more than entering an elite group of 44 otherwise white men, more than getting the keys to the House marched on just a few years ago, to have it sink in that voters have agreed that the single human image that will represent America is black.

Oprah Winfrey called it a “victory for hope.”

The extraordinary poet Maya Angelou, one of the best wordsmiths I have ever encountered, put it more simply.

“I’m a proud American today, baby.”