For my generation - and those before mine - it had always been a joke about one day (or never) there would be a black president. Turn the White House black.
In countless songs, from the blues to R&B to rap, in sooo many scripts of television shows or movies and in the pages of books from all kinds of authors, whether or not there could or would be a black president was either a joke or a pipe dream that few thought would REALLY happen.
Oh, there was pride when Shirley Chisholm became the first African American to be a major party candidate presidential candidate when she ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 1972. And many middle class Americans were energized and Grandmaster Melle Mel wrote a rap that became a very popular song "Jesse" when Jesse Jackson was a candidate during the Democratic presidential primaries.
And I'm not talking about people like Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Allen Keyes and others whose candidacies were seen by most as props for a party that really didn't support them and used them for publicity and a fake effort at diversifying a ballot.
I'm talking about candidates who inspired black Americans to think, "hey, this old joke could.... naaah."
Lo and behold, it happened.
I didn't support Barack Obama's effort when as a one-term U.S. Senator from Illinois, his main claim to fame was a great speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. I knew nothing about him and he hadn't made any dent in the national conversation prior to his run. I supported his opponent who I was familiar with. Hillary Clinton had been around local, state and national politics for decades, backed issues such as universal health care and seemed like a good choice to me.
But when it came time to go to the booth for the presidential primary after watching and listening to Obama's campaign, there was no way I could vote against this brother who for the first time made that old black joke, that long time line of hopeful to hopeless thinking, actually be reality. I voted for him and have ever since.
Yes, because he's black. But not just because he's black. There have been plenty of others who were black. But the presidency, the presidency of the United States, for the spot as the leader of the free world and head of the world's largest superpower, I needed more. He proved that he was more than a great black candidate. He earned my vote.
And the support of me and many many others worldwide before, during and after eight years of serving as president of the United States.
Yet as I write this less than an hour before he leaves office to someone who is the polar opposite of him - white, non-graceful, undignified and truly unqualified - I have to take pause. Our nation is polarized, mainly by forces who have used race as a dividing line and a wedge to keep themselves in power. They've used the sadness and fear that shrouds many white Americans to turn our proud nation into red and blue states, us against them.
Those forces spent eight years doing everything, from Day One when Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell said the Republican Party's priority would be to make sure the next president would not be a Democrat, to working towards making the first black president's tenure everything but a success. They fanned flames of hatred, racism and and partisianship rooted in and halves and full untruths to turn fact into fiction and completely fool a lot of hurting people.
But it could never turn Barack Obama's two terms as president into anything deemed unsuccessful by the open mind.
He proved he was more than qualified and was a great president despite the efforts to dent his work.
However a large part of his presidential tenure has to be viewed as what he did for black America. Not talking about the silly, misguided and self-serving efforts by so-called black intellectuals such as talkers and fame-seekers Cornell West, Tavis Smiley and others.
What Barack Obama did for black America was prove that no matter what we've seen for decades upon decades, centuries even, as a joke of a pipe dream, could really be a truism, even in this racially, politically charged mess that America has become.
He proved with dignity, intellect and style that the joke was part of our own evolution.
With hope, we have changed for the better.
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