The African American man I know said that last night he had a few family and friends over to his apartment to watch the election returns.
"There wasn't a dry eye in the house," he said. "For half an hour, we just cried and hugged each other. My daughter said, 'Daddy, why is everybody crying?' I told her that we had all seen so much . . . that sometimes tears have different feelings mixed in." His aunt, who had been sent to the backs of buses and the balconies of movie theaters in her native North Carolina; his parents, who came North in search of jobs; his cousins, who grew up here and struggled to avoid the notorious housing projects and the gangs and the crime that so many assume are a universal AA experience; they were gathered at my friend's apartment, in a suburb that two decades ago probably would have found a way to not let him move in.
This man and his wife have two young children. And everywhere they go, and in everything they do, they feel that they must be at their absolute best, and that their children must behave perfectly.
"Everyone is waiting for you to show your wild side, your animal nature," he told me. "Everyone wants to see how your represent, and they expect their worst impressions to be confirmed. So you have to do the exact opposite.
"All my friends and my family, wherever we work, and a lot of us, where we live, we are the first. There are no other African Americans. We don't have paths in front of us; we're cutting brush and hacking our own way through every day."
And what was the reaction of his friends and family to the historic victory of Barack Obama in the presidential election?
"We have to step up," my friend said without hesitation. "That's what I thought, and my friends all agreed with me. No one is thinking, 'Now we can relax.' There is a feeling that we have to make this work, and we have to work harder now to make everything around us better. Before, some of us felt like, you know, 'I'm not really part of this. I'm trying to be, but I'm . . . you know, I'm just not.'
"We don't feel that way today."
--T.A.
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