Maureen DowdI grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week.
Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel.
I saw one white customer quiz his black waitress at length at a chic soul food restaurant downtown, over deviled eggs and fried chicken livers, about whether she cried when Barack Obama won. She said she did, and he said he wept like a baby.
He wondered how long she thought it would take the new president to scrape the government up off the floor. “Three years,” she replied authoritatively.
I saw three white women asking a black bartender at the Bombay Club, across Lafayette Park from the White House, if he was happy and what he thought about Jesse Jackson’s flowing tears at Grant Park, given his envious threat to cut off a sensitive part of Obama’s anatomy. “I think the tears were real,” the bartender said.
And did he feel it would be better to refer to Obama as half-white and half-black, or simply black, they pressed.
“Black,” the bartender responded. “Because it means more.”
But one of the women insisted, shouldn’t we call the new president African-American instead of black? And wasn’t he really, really excited about Obama? The bartender gently explained he was not even a Democrat; he was a libertarian.
I saw a white-haired white woman down the block from me running out to strike up a conversation with a black U.P.S. delivery guy, asking him how he felt and what this meant to him.
I was starting to feel guilty. Every time I passed a black patron at a downtown restaurant or a movie or the Kennedy Center, would perfect strangers want me to ask how they were feeling? Or was that condescending and were they sick to death of it?
How would I know if I didn’t ask them?
I heard my cute black mailman talking in an excited voice outside my house Friday, so I decided I should go ask him how he was feeling about everything, the absolute amazement of the first black president. If you don’t count what Toni Morrison said about Bill Clinton, that is.
But should we count it? Was Barack Obama the first or the second black president, or alternatively, the first half-white, half-black president?
I eagerly swung my front door open and joined the mailman’s conversation.
“Are you talking about the election?” I said brightly. “How do you feel?”
He shot me a look of bemused disdain as he walked away. I suddenly realized, with embarrassment, that he was on his Bluetooth, deep in a personal conversation that had nothing to do with Barack Obama.
I grew up down the block from Fort Stevens, where Lincoln in his frock coat dodged the bullets of Jubal Early’s Confederate troops in the battle that saved the capital. It was a mostly black neighborhood. I’ve never seen the capital become truly integrated.
After the O. J. Simpson verdict, when black Howard University law students cheered, and during the Million Man March, led by Louis Farrakhan, a man who peddles racial and religious divisions, I wondered if we had lived and played apart for so long that we had lost track of how different our experiences and thoughts and perceptions of progress were.
President Bush was a divider, not a decider. And the city and the country followed his bunker mentality. After 9/11, the White House and Capitol were ever more blockaded, and there seemed to be fewer and fewer bridges across any of our divisions — racial, political, social and cultural.
But now we have the delicious irony that a white president from a patrician family, whose administration was so negligent about America’s poor and black citizens, was so incompetent that he helped elect the first black president.
As Andrew Young told Stephen Colbert, “The world got so messed up nobody else wanted to really tackle it so then they turned it over to us.”
And we have images to share that are harmonizing, not polarizing — black and white students cheering and celebrating in front of the White House and the warm and fuzzy obsession about what kind of hypoallergenic puppy Sasha and Malia will get.
It’s cool that President-elect Cool has gotten everybody chatting, even if it’s awkward small talk. And it’s fun, after so many years of unyielding barriers, to feel sentimental.
“When suddenly CNN revealed its wall-sized announcement of the outcome, I experienced a blissful and unembarrassed rush of racialism,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New Republic. “Only a hologram of Frederick Douglass would have excited me more.”
But is it time now for whites to stop polling blacks on their feelings?
I’ll have to call my friend Gwen Ifill tomorrow and ask her how she feels about that.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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