I’m still caught somewhere between awe, disbelief, relief, and giddiness over Obama’s win last night and this morning. I figured that a person of color would be highly competitive for America’s highest office in our lifetime, but until this year, I wasn’t sure about someone winning it all. But what does it really mean? Are we really past race in America? Has Obama transcended race? Does it mean, as the great neocon Bill Bennett said last night, that there “are no more excuses” for African Americans and other folks of color when it comes to opportunity? Was this a truly post-racial campaign and movement that swept Obama into office?

One of my first book talks for my book Fear of a “Black” America occurred at my former job during Black History Month in ’05. About forty people turned out to hear me outline the themes around multiculturalism and American fears of such across race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I discussed the so-called Culture Wars of the late-80s and ’90s, including neocons like Bennett, Dinesh D’Souza, Newt Gingrich, their fears of multiculturalism and their skepticism of an increasingly diverse America.

It was a good talk, as the audience asked so many questions about multiculturalism in the twenty-first century. There were Blacks in the audience who, despite my talk, still thought multiculturalism was a philosophical Barney the Dinosaur song (“I love you, you love me …”). There were Whites who claimed that Blacks weren’t doing enough to overcome the steep socioeconomic and educational barriers that they’ve face over the past four decades. There were Latinos and Asians who, though they agreed with me, didn’t think that I spent enough time talking about other forms of diversity.

Toward the end of the talk, an African American woman in her late forties asked me, “Are we ever going to see the day when racism in this country no longer exists?” Although I could tell some in the audience were snickering at her question, it was a profound question as it was simple in my mind. For it showed someone who lived through the heart of the Civil Rights era who was still willing to hold on to the hope that Blacks and other groups of color would be fully woven into the American tapestry and able to exercise their rights without fear or expectation of discrimination.

So I answered the question, seriously combining my sense of realism and optimism around race in America. I said, “Sure, it’s possible. Look at what has happened with my generation — Generation X — and Generation Y and this new generation coming up now. We’re more receptive to each other in popular culture, more willing to date and marry. I don’t think that racism will ever be fully eradicated, as it will probably evolve into some other form. But I do think that even within our lifetimes, racism as we know it now will be significantly less than it is even now.” I went on to say that even if that didn’t happen, that we as a nation need to do our part in working toward this goal.

I didn’t have the presidency in mind specifically when I said this. I was thinking about my son Noah and the kind of country I want so much for him to grow up in. One where his possibilities aren’t limited because of race or my level of education (although I think I took care of that issue years ago) or because I stagnated in my job or career. I was thinking about the barriers that I had faced to get to my place in life at thirty-five. Between poverty, race, abuse, and actual barriers that I needed to overcome, including professors and supervisors who refused to believe that I was as smart, articulate, and talented as I presented myself to be. I was thinking about where I would want the country to be by the time my son would graduate from high school, the year 2021. I knew that a lot would have to happen for Noah to have the opportunity to go to college as his right, not a gun-slinging gamble like it was for me twenty years ago.

As I’ve said in previous postings, I don’t think that Obama and our election of him means that this country has moved past race. Nor that Obama transcends race. Nor that we’re in a post-racial nation. I can almost guarantee that at least one agent will decide not to represent Boy At The Window because of their calculations of race in their market analysis. Or that I won’t be considered for a high-level job in academia or in the foundation world because of race. Or that I’ll be followed around a book store or a cab driver won’t stop for my hail because of race. And all with President Obama at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

But I also know as an academically-trained historian that a lot has changed in the past thirty or forty years. Folks in this country aren’t colorblind. Whites have warmed up to the idea that Blacks, Latinos and other folks of color are capable of anything, great, horrible and anything in between. Blacks have long since known that we possess the intellectual and spiritual resources necessary to break down any barrier. And younger Americans (and I still include myself in this category — I don’t turn forty until the end of next year) — if they’ve moved past anything — have pushed beyond the Black-White Civil Rights era and ’60s mantra of ideas on race and social justice in general. Obama’s victory opens up a more complicated discussion of race that the O.J. Simpson trials in the ’90s could’ve possibly permitted.

This election is an opportunity to make America’s ideals mean something to so many again, and to do it in everyday and practical terms. Nothing more, nothing less. We’ll know more about the meaning of it all in 2012.

We’re on the same calendar sequence as the one for ’80. Both are leap years, Olympic years (except for that US/NATO boycott of the Summer Olympic Games in Moscow), years that the LA Lakers went to the NBA Finals and the Phillies won the World Series. Both were tough years economically. I clearly remember the inflation rate being about 14 percent, a year after an 11 percent inflation rate (or was it 14 percent in ’79 and 11 percent in ’80? – it really doesn’t matter). It was a year of the Iranian hostage crisis and the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. As a sixth-grader, I’d become more aware of the larger world of geopolitics, pop culture and ideology than I would’ve thought possible even a year and a half earlier.

At home, things were better than they had been in years. My stepfather Maurice had jumped ship a month earlier — that first Saturday in October — saying that he couldn’t take it with my mother anymore. He’d taken half of the meat out of our two refrigerators (we used to order meat wholesale to save money in those halcyon days) and the only working TV in the house. Luckily I had struck up a friendship with a kid in my building named Tre, who was a couple of years younger, but very smart. Most of the TV viewing I did between October ’80 and April ’81 was in his mother and father’s apartment on the second floor of 616.

Tre’s wasn’t the only friendship that I valued back then. My best friend in those days was a kid named Starling, who shared many of my interests in politics, pop culture, history and religion. I admired him as much as admired any person up to that point in my life. He would eventually end our friendship over the whole Hebrew-Israelite thing, as he was a Baptist who spent quite a bit of time attempting to get me saved (his father was a pastor).

But that wasn’t the main thing on our minds in October and early November. The ’80 election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Wilson Reagan had us both concerned. We knew that Carter hadn’t done the best job, that the economy was reeling from high inflation, job stagnation, and high interest rates. We also knew that Carter’s desperation to solve the hostage crisis made him look like a wimp, and it showed in his debates with Reagan. In the back of my mind, at least, I sensed that Carter had lost the election when those eight special forces soldiers died in a fiery crash in southern Iran in a vain attempt to rescue the hostages in early April ’80. I fully remember the image of a downed and virtually crushed helicopter on its side on the cover of Time Magazine from the second week in April. I felt bad, for the people who died and for Carter.

Yet I hadn’t given up. Starling and I had picked up on the rumors started by some truly afraid of our nation’s turn to the right that Reagan represented the Antichrist. After all, each part of his name had six letters! It makes me laugh now, but I seriously believed that Reagan would destroy the lives of the people I knew in a tangibly direct way.

It was a strange time and time of my life really. I was just starting to get into music, listening to everything from Billy Joel, Donna Summer, Kenny Loggins and The Bee Gees to Stephanie Mills, Teddy Pendergrass, and Luther Vandross (even though I really didn’t know who he was at that point). In the weeks going into Election Day, I found myself intrigued by Pink Floyd’s The Wall, singing to Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust,” dancing to Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration,” and in attendance at a Sugar Hill Gang concert. There was a Disco backlash (fueled by anti-gay furor), an anti-Black backlash (fueled by affirmative action and economic uncertainty), an emerging fundamentalist Christian movement (represented in some ways by everyone from Pat Robertson to Jim Jones), and an anti-poor backlash (connected of course to race and ethnicity).

It was a time to be engaged in the political process, and I was. I asked every person I knew who they planned to vote for, argued with classmates about why Reagan was wrong for our country, and went to the polls on Election Day and challenged people with Reagan-Bush signs about their reasons for voting for “voodoo economics.” I sensed that Reagan didn’t represent me, didn’t care about people like me, and hoped that people like me would go away. I just didn’t think that there were millions of other people who wanted the same time.

To say the least, I was disappointed on November 4 of ’80 when Reagan obliterated Carter in the electoral college, ushering in the Reagan years. I’ve learned over the years not to see Reagan as the Antichrist. I’ve come to understand over the years that Reagan wasn’t the reason for the end of my friendships or for my family’s economic and social demise. I could no more hold Reagan responsible for the domestic violence I would experience in ’82 than I could my classmates. But Reagan’s trickle-down, supply-side, and anti-poor economic policies were never meant to help anyone falling into poverty, or for that matter, anyone not already highly educated and in a white-collar job. The Democratic Party couldn’t find anyone with the charm and optimism of Reagan, not in the ’80s. Nor could it redefine itself in a post-Civil Rights, post-New Deal coalition era. I only vaguely understood this during the ’80s.

What I knew immediately after the election, though, was that the optimism that I’d spent the first eleven years of my life growing up around was over. Our family’s attempt to cope turned into three years of Hebrew-Israelite bizarreness, a decade and a half of welfare poverty and seven years of domestic violence hell. It would be another twelve years before I heard anyone other than Jesse Jackson talk as if they represented all Americans, and by then, I was more cynical as a grad student than I am now. Slick Willie didn’t help matters.

My greatest hope is that tomorrow’s election does the exact opposite for me and all of the people I like and love that Election ’80 helped foster in my life in the ’80s. I agree with Obama. I can’t afford four more years of what I’ve lived through over the past twenty-eight, and I don’t think that the rest of the country can either.