In My Lifetime

When I was a kid:

My teachers did not tell people like me that we could grow up to be president of the United States. They knew better.

Adults in my neighborhood did not believe civil rights meant living in an America where race didn't matter. That was the stuff dreams were made of.

Seperate societies were how we learned, worked, ate, prayed, loved and lived.

I remember many first. Carl Stokes, first black big city mayor; Guy Buford, first black astronaut; Arthur Ashe, first black Wimbledon winner; Thurgood Marshall, Colin Powell, Mae Jemison, Edward Brooke, etc... I could go on and on.

Today, an American Democrat is his party's presidential nominee. The headlines say one thing-- the pictures speak for themselves.

Yet, when Barack Obama spoke in Minnesota Tuesday night, he proudly recognized his grandmother in Hawaii, too frail to travel to be here.

She is what native islanders once called a Haole.

My point is that like Halle Berry, Tiger Woods, D-C Mayor Adrian Fenty, Lenny Kravitz all represent what can happen in American when someone decides if at least for a moment, race really doesn't matter.

In the five month campaign before Americans elect their next president many Americans, white, black or otherwise may have come to understand that position, if only for briefly.

They may even paraphrase Walt Kelly's old comic strip character Pogo and decide for a moment that they have-- both black or white-- looked at the presidential candidate, "and he is us!"