In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Barack Obama M i l e s Tr av e l e d, M i l e s to G o I. 2009 It hits me most when I’m in the car. At the top of the hour, any hour, on any day of the week in the wake of January twentieth, the newscast leads with a report of President Obama. What he said or did, what he’s thinking, or what issues he’s grappling with in the near future. I stare at the dashboard: President Obama! Who? I almost laugh in astonishment. I thrill with a feeling , too rich and heady to contain in the small space of my Chrysler, at having gotten away with something I had no right to get away with; it feels like getting a shot of pure oxygen when you’ve been breathing bad air so long, the good stuff almost kills you. I would die happy breathing this, so happy it wouldn’t feel like death but a kind of effortless transcendence that religion always promises but that reality has slyly delivered ahead of it. I’d be damned happy to be dead. Maybe I am. Who in the hell would have thought? Who would have thought at all that they’d be here for this? President Obama. I sigh big, adjust my grip on the wheel, shake my head to clear it. But I’m eager for it to fill up again. Eager to contemplate, again, how Barack was close to me forty years ago in ways that I couldn’t have imagined until today. Yes, he was there all along. But for a quirk of geography (I was in L.A.; he was five hours across the water in Hawaii), he could have been in third grade with me, one smart, unbottled black boy among many in the very early ’70s, one of relatively few boys who succeeded, one of even fewer who made it big. But never mind—in the beginning , Barack Obama was Gerald, was Gabriel, was Dwayne, was Stephen, Joe, David, Kevin, Patrick, and Derrick. They were all there, and all equally possible. Wherever they are now, I hope they burn with the old sense of open road as much as I do when the realization of President Obama lands on me in the middle of traffic, as it does routinely. I almost have to brake from the impact. It makes me remember. It is glorious. And then it passes. The newscast segues into a talk show or a song, and 58 State of a Nation then I’m simply in the car, driving. I’m going along a boulevard toward home, a largely black neighborhood on the outskirts of South Central. Almost against my will, I look at what I’m returning to. I reluctantly take stock of the red graffiti that cuts across pale brick walls like flesh wounds, idle storefronts, young black men congregated around the open door of a tattoo shop like it’s a church hall. The distance between all of this and Barack and the new way he’s supposed to be showing us is frustrating, crazy-­ making. Does no one see? In all the praise, and even in the doubt of Barack, there has been almost no acknowledgement of this whole black netherworld of grinding sameness, non-­ movement, hope gone slack. It’s a world that belongs to all black people, wherever they end up, and to the rest of America, this world of weak schooling and even weaker job prospects and prison stints that have threatened black people always; this generation is no different. The burden and blame for this state of affairs is all of ours. This is what we are loath to admit, to see, that Barack is extraordinary, but he is not our difference. Not yet. For black people so hungry for victory, the most I can say is that Barack is certainly of us, a shining example of us, but he is not all of us. The strange truth is that we secured a black president before we secured justice for the vast majority of black people; of course, nobody thought things would happen in this order, but they have, and now we are groping for the way forward. Some say that there is no more need for a way forward, that a particularly murky chapter of black struggle has finally come to an end. What struggle is that? The struggle to become president...

Share