The Election That Keeps on Giving

Some notes I scribbled down over the weekend about the election. It’s a little colder now, but I think the sentiment remains the same:

The euphoria over the election of Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America may have died down, but there remains a feeling—on the street, in people’s homes, in cafes and bars—that this momentous event is still percolating through society and will continue to do so for months, probably years, to come.
I live in a predominantly black neighborhood in Brooklyn, on the border of Crown Heights, scene of a race riot in 1991, and Prospect Heights, a small, rapidly-gentrifying area where just a couple of generations ago few whites would consider living.
Today, black, white, gay, straight, Jew and gentile co-exist as well as any group of people living on top of each other can. Obama’s election did little to change the geniality that characterizes daily life in many of Brooklyn’s vibrant, multiethnic communities. But it certainly changed the way I, as a white, Jewish, British immigrant, perceive, and feel proud for, my black neighbors.

On November 4 and 5, the joy over Obama’s election could be heard in the shouts and car horns echoing down our block, seen in the newspaper and magazine headlines that trumpeted a historic victory the next day, and sensed in the unusually good mood that seemed to envelop most New Yorkers for the rest of the week. It was as though the Yankees had won the World Series and the entire city was a fan.
A couple of weeks on, and that sense of victory can still be felt, whether it be a celebratory toast at a party or a snippet of conversation overheard in the street. New Yorkers have a much greater tendency to talk to each other than Londoners. And traveling home on the 2 subway train the other day, I overheard a Hispanic girl complement a black female passenger who was wearing a large pin with a picture of the Obamas above the slogan “Africa’s First Family.” Her compliment was a simple as “I like your pin.” Yet it implied “I’m with you, too.”

The last stop on the 2 line in Manhattan is Wall Street, a neighborhood that is in desperate need of “hope” and “change” and a “yes, we can” attitude. As the train rumbles into Brooklyn, white passengers disembark in the upscale neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. By the time it reaches my stop, at Eastern Parkway-Brooklyn Museum, the white exodus is almost complete save for perhaps a few white students who have opted for the cheaper rents of Crown Heights.
As a white passenger it is hard not to look at the faces of your fellow black commuters—students and workers, mothers and fathers—and wonder what it means for them and their children that after so many generations of inequality and oppression, a black man is headed for the White House? How would they have felt if, as many had quietly feared, white voters had deserted the black candidate in the privacy of the polling booth? Does it mean anything to them that more white men and women voted for Barack Obama in 2008 than John Kerry in 2004?

After exiting the train I make my way down Washington Avenue, a disheveled thoroughfare lined with shabby bodegas and peppered with numerous barber shops and hair braiding salons, Caribbean restaurants and a check cashing office. The weather is still mild enough for people to continue the summer habit of congregating on the pavement, many sitting on fold out chairs and engaged in animated conversation.
I don’t feel any more welcome weaving between them in the dawn of the age of Obama than I did last month. After all, I am still a gentrifier, a yuppie whose very presence threatens to perpetuate the steady influx of young whites to the area and to continue to drive up real estate prices and rents. But I do feel as though the gap between us has narrowed. For all they know I could have been one of the millions of white Americans who manned phone banks or fanned out across polling stations, who pulled the lever or pushed the button that helped put Barack Obama where he is today.
For if the simple act of electing a man can only go so far in healing the wounds of slavery and segregation, it does at least prove one thing. That in the space of a little under a couple of years, America has undergone a momentous change.