An Historic Senior Year

Quite often when you are on the precipice of history, you are too caught up in the moment to realize it.

Last week, a parade went through a city that had to wake the dead to learn the route. Beers were spilled, Kleenex’s stock skyrocketed and the FCC cringed. And so the city of Philadelphia rocked and rolled, but before the ink dried on the “c” of historic, Barack Obama’s name was announced over the PA system and he strode to the plate as the 44th President of the United States.

The first thing that left my lips as Brad Lidge returned to Earth and fell to his knees was “I never thought I’d see this day,” and I was not alone. For any Philadelphia fan born after June 1983, a world championship was a foreign concept. So when Eric Hinske swung through strike three on Oct. 29, it marked a cosmic shift in the psyche of pouting Philly fans. No longer are we losers, no longer will we expect heartache and forever will we remember that day (This does not apply to you, wearers of midnight green. Please do not think you are off the hook. This Phillies’ championship only makes the fact that you are without a Lombardi trophy beyond pathetic.).

How fitting then, in a fall of firsts, that U.S. voters took the last (public) step to bury the long, ugly past of discrimination against blacks in this country. As I watched our next president give a stirring acceptance speech just before the calendar read 5, I recalled my childhood growing up in a county where I was the minority. I remember 5th grade, and learning of the horrible history of race relations, stunned by the words I read in Roll of Thunder, Here My Cry. I had sat next to my black peers all my life, but my adolescent naiveté was shaken upon learning that was not always the case.

From there, the crusade was on; I devoured the rest of Mildred D. Taylor’s books, I pressed my parents for more information and I opened my eyes to see if this was still a problem around me. I did everything a 10-year old could to learn about racism and be sure that I was never a part of it.

However, it never occurred to me that racism went both ways. I never thought of the mistrust and the scars that remained with much of the black population. But when I reached high school, one of my basketball teammates went out of his way to express his misgivings of the fair-skinned fellows. He had been raised with an admirable level of pride for his race, but along with it, an utter lack of courtesy or interest in his white classmates.

This was stunning to me. For so long, I had been concerned with racism going one way, but never had thought of it coming back at me. I had never been disliked because of my skin color, or at least not to my knowledge. Despite this, he and I would eventually become friends after he was injured and forced to share the bench with me for the season. I would eventually learn of his fears and feelings, some understandable, some uninformed. I only hope I helped him grow as much as he did for me.

This story, and ones like it, became history on Tuesday night. 2008 was not a presidential election; it was a sea-change. As a white man, I cannot begin to understand the pain, the humiliation and the frustrations that black men and women have felt over the course of their lives, but the elation I saw on their faces Tuesday night helped explain it. Barack Obama has energized a generation, educated a population and made good on the promise that in America, anything is possible. Fortunately and unfortunately, this election had everything to do with race, but now that Barack has achieved the highest position in the land, hopefully it will be the last time that that is ever the case.

Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Barack could run, and Barack ran so our children could fly. Wise words from a source smarter than me.