More Election Stuff

I'm with it enough to recognize the historical significance of what happened Tuesday night. I got chills watching the celebrations (and also a little sick every time I had to look at Al Sharpton) but I can't pretend to have felt it the way some of my friends have. I asked one of them yesterday what Tuesday night had been like for her, trying to ask an open-ended enough question that she'd have room to let me as inside as she wanted to, and we had a good talk. (Or she did, and I had a good listen.) As she spoke her eyes welled up and again, I got chills.

When I asked her what the election had changed for her, she talked about her pre-teen son, and then she told me that she knew that lots of white people had to have voted for Obama too. That the black vote alone wouldn't have been enough to win it. "White people voted for one of us," she whispered and her eyes narrowed as she leaned in closer to me. "Now when I walk past a white person," (and she was talking about her co-workers -- people she's been close to for a long time,) "I think, maybe they don't think we're all stupid."

Broke my heart.