Today Congress is set to vote on the $825 billion economic stimulus package that is a good political balance between infrastructural, long-term economic stimulus — the multiplier effect — and tax cuts and incentives that will allegedly prime the economic pump in the short term. Great. We have a plan that almost no one is happy with, politically or practically, that no one is sure will work, and that few outside of the neocons think has enough infrastructural stimulus in it. Still, it’s better than what the Reagan Administration did to deal with the last great economic recession of 1981-83, nearly two years of icy cold economic stagnation and decline.

Both Obama’s package and the malignant neglect of the Reagan Administration of the working poor and the bitterly poor have much in common, in that the “raising all boats” philosophy of economic growth remains out in the cold. Yeah, some shoring up of COBRA for un/underemployed workers in need of health care help. Extending unemployment payments and putting more money in the system so that states don’t have to dip more in their bare coffers to make those payments are helpful. More of the plan looks like the same old, same old than even the most optimistic care to admit.

We have more people unemployed now than we did in October-November ’82, when the unemployment rate hovered just under 11 percent. The unemployment rate may be significantly less than that (at least for now), but the number of folks unemployed is currently at a twenty-six-year high. Whatever else could be said, at least Obama’s response has been to do as much of something as possible, even if the “something” isn’t much for the poorest among us.

I should know. This time twenty-six years ago was my mother’s last week or so working for Mount Vernon Hospital as a supervisor of the Dietary Department. Not that she loved the job, but she had been working there for more than sixteen years, including fourteen in a supervisory role.

Now some of what happened to her in this job was her own fault. Six months earlier, my mother had a choice to make, between standing in solidarity with her co-workers on the picket line and crossing the line to keep money coming in. Although she was a decade-and-a-half veteran of Mount Vernon Hospital, my mother never joined the union. She didn’t want to pay “them bloodsuckers” dues, and said that she “couldn’t afford them” anyway. That was her excuse for becoming a strikebreaker.

Who could blame the union for going on strike in July ’82? Now only was unemployment nationally was at ten percent, and Mount Vernon’s rate was probably double that. Inflation in ’79 and ’80 was about 14 and 11 percent respectively, and was over seven percent in ’81. It had easily wiped out any cost-of-living raises over the previous four years and management had refused a five-percent-per-year increase in wages over three years. Even I realized at twelve that the union had little choice but to strike.

Despite my mother’s negative attitude around unions, her co-workers and friends—all union members—hoped that she would join them at the picket line. My mother refused, citing parental hardship and the need for money as reasons. I can only imagine how much spit and venom my mother faced on her way to work every day for three weeks. Considering our financial state, which I knew because I checked the mail and looked at our bills every day, picketing and getting union benefits might have been better than working. It wasn’t as if there was food in the house to eat anyway. She was taking food from work and bringing it home for us to eat for dinner at least three times a week. As much as enjoyed Mount Vernon Hospital’s Boston Cream Pie, I thought that picketing for a better wage was the better way to go. My mother’s fear for our short-term future would be one of the worst mistakes she ever made.

The hospital’s concession of five percent increases per year over three years at the end of July left them looking to cut costs. The only personnel left vulnerable were non-union service workers and their supervisors. In October ’82, my mother had been cut to half-time by her boss Mrs. Hunce. Of the two other supervisors, one was a “West Indian” woman—my mother’s language, not mine—with seniority, the other a “White girl” with less than three years of experience but had a union card. My mother was screwed, but it was a screwing of her own making, at least in part.

I wasn’t surprised, but the news made me ask myself “What else could happen?” After all, our Hebrew-Israelite diet had declined to the point where the last week to ten days of every month was spent eating Great Northern Beans and rice, and that was when my mother worked full-time. The first month after the work reduction, all we had left to eat in our two-refrigerator kitchen was a box of Duncan Hines’ Devil’s Food cake mix, Pillsbury All-Purpose Flour, and some sugar. And this was six days before my mother got paid again. That last weekend in October, we truly ate like Torah-era Jews. Mom made us pancakes out of the flour, without baking powder, eggs or milk, and cooked down some sugar in water to make us a crude glucose syrup.

The other shoe, though, was that my mother was pregnant, again, with the baby that would become my only sister, Sarai. To say the least, this was the first time in my life that I truly thought that my mother was stupid.

It wasn’t completely her fault, though. Between the inflation-fueled recession, the inevitable transition of our economic to cheap service industry labor, and Reagan’s efforts at union busting, my mother had some rather difficult choices to make. Through in an abusive, un/underemployed husband, four post-natal kids and the sheer sense of helplessness that comes from all of this, and it become easier to empathize with what my mother was going through. Like many of us right now, she was desperately attempting to hang on, to her marriage — even though she likely knew he wasn’t worth it — to her kids, to our basic food, clothing and shelter needs.

Reagan’s tax cuts didn’t help matters. Nor did his decisions to keep the minimum wage at $3.35 an hour, to reduce unemployment benefits, to keep what used to be AFDC — welfare — stagnant, to basically shred the already thin social safety net created by FDR during the New Deal years of the Great Depression. My mother and my family, forced to go on welfare in April ’83, had become a socioeconomic statistic because of dumb decisions and the Reagan economic agenda. We were now a part of the underclass. Being on welfare did save us from homelessness, but it did nothing to inspire us to think of having a brighter future.

Whatever else can be said about Obama’s package today and it’s limited impact on the poor, it in no way can be said to be making things worst for the poorest among us. It may well be too much to expect a plan that cleans up more than three decades of political expediency around the nation’s economy and infrastructure, and this package is hardly the best it could be. Maybe, just maybe, it will help to make another mother’s decision to fight for living wages and her kids easier and not harder. And keep those teetering between working poverty and TANF welfare poverty from falling all the way in the rabbit hole.

It’s funny how we meet people, make friends, start dating, bonding and get into serious relationships. It’s not like we wake up one morning and say, “Let’s make some friends today.” When I was fifteen years younger, I might’ve thought, “I need to get laid tonight,” but I didn’t exactly sit down and plan for something like that. Regardless of what some of you may think of that thought process, the fact is that there have been times in my adult life when it has been amazingly easy to become friends with folks. Complete strangers with little in common other than a school, a church, a city, a bar or a job site. With a wife, a son, and the “lofty” positions of consultant and professor, it’s not so easy to be friends, even with my current friends.

One goofy example of how friendships have happened in my life was one Friday twenty years ago. I was in the middle of my sophomore year at Pitt, with a full class load of existential philosophy, macroeconomics, Shakespeare, the second half of Biology, and a writing seminar for history majors. I was working full-time at Pitt’s computer labs, somewhere around 36 hours a week between the end of January and the beginning of April in ’89. It was a busy schedule, but I needed the money and thought that a semester of Keynesian economics and Kierkegaard’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” would be fun. Yeah, sure. With work and classes taking up so much of my time and energy, it was difficult to find a social life that would bring some balance.

It took one Friday at the end of January to solidify one group of folks who I would count in my circle. After a long week, I wasn’t feeling particularly hot, so I went home after my Bio class and took a long nap. When I woke up, it was already after seven. I quickly washed up and decided to spend the evening at the student union watching TV since I didn’t have any plans. Poor me.

I went to the TV room and started watching what seemed like the three-thousandth episode of Dallas on CBS. I hadn’t seen much of the show since Victoria Principal’s character had awaken from a year-long dream about losing her husband, played by Patrick Duffy. Almost two years had passed between episodes for me, yet it only took one twelve-minute segment for me to figure out the new story line. I turned to Kenny and his tall friend, both of whom were sitting behind me in the next row, and said, “This story’s ridiculous.” Nothing particularly profound. Except that opened the door for Kenny to fire off some jokes, which then allowed me to put my sense of New York irony and sarcasm to work.

Before long we were having a good time making fun of the show. I soon learned that Kenny and his friend were from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital, which I’d gone through only by Amtrak. “I’m sorry,” I said in hearing the news. Still, it wasn’t Mount Vernon. “That would be worse,” I thought. Over the next few minutes, Michele, whom I’d met the previous semester, had come into the room said “Hey,” and joined in on our hilarity of the show. Two others came in over the next twenty minutes, others that would form part of a group that I’d stay in touch with for a decade. First there was Bryan, a short White dude with John Lennon-type rose-colored glasses whose hairline was already receding and thinning at the same time. He dressed like a young professor would, with a big green and blue-striped scarf that hanged down to his knees, along with khaki slacks. Bryan chimed in immediately, aware that we weren’t really watching the show.

And then came Terri, also short and different. At five-two, she had short dark-brown hair and also wore glasses, though not as cool as Bryan’s. There was something about Terri that I knew was different, that she wasn’t just “Black,” whatever that meant. She was one of the first openly biracial women I’d come to know. It seemed like those were the first words out of her mouth. Maybe not. But Terri did tell us she was “half-Black and half-White” before the night was over. Terri and Bryan obviously knew each other, as they came in together already in the midst of another conversation. She immediately jumped into our growing conversation once they sat down and criticized Dallas as one of many examples of lily-Whiteness on TV. That launched a whole new discussion, with everything from The Cosby Show to 227.

After about an hour of debates, jokes and wonderful conversation, we all went out into Oakland. We started at the The O, Original’s for those who’ve never been to Pitt or Pittsburgh. It had already been a mainstay for students and ex-steelworkers in need of cheap food and beer since 1960. The Pitt football team often drank and caroused there, often getting into fights with Pitt Police. This Friday it was overcrowded and dirty, and we wanted to talk. Terri had already become the leader of our pack, and took us over to Hemingway’s as an alternative. The bar and restaurant was The O’s opposite, very quiet, very reserved, very much an older and Whiter crowd. It was also the first time I’d been carded, so I couldn’t have a drink even if I wanted to.

The six of us talked until well after midnight, with me being the first to leave. We exchanged email addresses and phone numbers (in some cases) in the process. I was amped after having met so many folks so quickly and with so little effort. All it took was one innocent comment on Dallas.

Bryan, Kenny, Terri and Michele became a big part my existing and increasingly diverse group of acquaintances and friends. I continued talking to and hanging out with Elaine, who worked at Hillman Library. I eventually met her older sister Donna, who apparently had gotten Elaine her library job. Elaine also introduced me to her goofy cousin Kendall, goofy yet cool at the same time somehow. I learned that Elaine was one of six kids, each following in ABC birth order — with Elaine obviously the baby sibling — grew up in Homestead, one of Pittsburgh’s great steel-mill suburbs before USX (formerly US Steel) closed its plants in the mid ’80s.

It was another branch on the chain of discovery for me, discovering how to be a friend and how to maintain friendships. It was digging beyond the initial “Hi”s and small-talk conversations to real issues, hopes and dreams, jealousies and minor flaws of others that made me cherish these new people in my life. Of course, I still talked and occasionally went to lunch or a movie with my friends from my freshman year, like Regis and the Henderson twins and numerous others I’d come to know since the fall of ’87. I finally felt comfortable at the University of Pittsburgh, and for the first time in years, more comfortable with my awkward and goofy self.

After years of playing the role of loner and otherwise just not trusting anyone, it felt good to finally have folks in my life that I thought I could trust, or at least laugh out loud with in and out of the classroom. Seeing myself through their eyes enabled me to not see myself as an abused twelve-year-old anymore. Seeing myself through the eyes of my new set of friends allowed me to see myself beyond those years at 616 and in Mount Vernon, maybe and truly for the first time.

The best description I’ve heard of Obama’s inaugural address yesterday was from the ever-thoughtful David Gergen. He called it a “muscular speech,” one meant for our times. And these are hard times. When the New York Times needs a bailout, you know times are tough.

Folks who read my blog regularly know that I’ve taken up a lot of my postings of examples of the hard times in which I grew up. Heck, most of my childhood was filled with hardship, and more recent setbacks don’t seem like setbacks at all when measured against it. I can think of a more recent time when it was hard going for me and for my significant other (now wife), when it took every bit of energy I had to move on to the next phase of our lives.

It started soon after I finished my dissertation at the end of ’96. My advisor Joe Trotter all but refused to help me find a full-time academic job, and I didn’t trust his couple of ridiculous suggestions anyway. It was hardly the best way to start my search for full-time employment as a historian. Still, I had the spring of ’97 to find a job while still on Carnegie Mellon’s payroll as an adjunct professor. Despite my advisor’s lack of support, I ended up doing interviews at Teachers College and Slippery Rock University. Only to finish second in one process and for Slippery Rock to put the position on hold. My then girlfriend, meanwhile, had left her job as a personnel director at a downtown Pittsburgh market research firm to find better paying work and to complete her bachelor’s degree at Pitt, so money started to get tight.

Our economic fortunes went south that summer, as I was unemployed for a bit more than three months. Looking back, I guess I could’ve groveled for a course to teach at Carnegie Mellon. But I’d heard too many horror stories from PhD grads who found themselves jobless getting paid as little as $400 per course while teaching there, so I didn’t bother. I was also embarrassed to find myself both Dr. Collins and unemployed, so I stopped hanging out with my folks for a while. I ended up taking a part-time job at Carnegie Library creating curriculum for a community-based computer lab, something I could’ve done without any of my degrees. I did find a teaching gig at Duquesne University, in their College of Education, but my first course didn’t begin until ’98.

I spent most of the first half of ’98 working part-time and helping my girlfriend stay focused so that she could finish her degree. She now had a full-time job and was taking eighteen credits — six courses — at the same time. Her boss fired her the day after she finished her degree, unofficially because her degree put her in direct competition with him. Officially, it had something to do with her unwillingness to work one late shift after six months of working late shifts and occasional weekends. We did put one op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that spring. Other than that, I only applied for nine academic jobs that first nine months of ’98. I didn’t know who to trust for help, and I was both frustrated and likely a little depressed.

After teaching at Duquesne for a few months, I realized what I needed to do. Teaching grad students by day and working with homeless people who were jacking off to porn, elderly students who didn’t understand what a computer was, and teenage posses on computers and in classes at night was too big a psychological switch for me. So I allowed the grant allotment for my position to run out, quit my job and signed on for teaching additional course at Duquesne in ’98 and ’99. Even with partial unemployment, I knew that times would be tough and only get tougher before we’d recover financially.

Long-term underemployment does have one advantage over the daily grind. The time to think about your future, how to shape it, how to allow and enable others to share in that plan or vision, who to trust or at least ask for help, how to get out of your own way to make things happen. I realized that it would’ve taken me until now to get a call for a job I wanted if I only planned to apply for nine jobs in nine months. I wanted to write, but I realized that I wasn’t particularly interested in writing academic journal-length articles (I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do as a writer). I also knew that we needed to leave Pittsburgh. I figured that the only way I’d find a job relevant to my degrees and training was if either of my advisors from Carnegie Mellon or Pitt were to keel over or if I picked up a teaching certificate. My other half was being turned down for jobs because she had a bachelor’s degree, and she was depressed herself.

At the end of ’98, I moved in with my girlfriend. It was primarily a financial decision. I realized that it didn’t matter what my mother or my future mother-in-law thought. They weren’t paying any of our bills, helping us find work, ponying up money for us to get married or to move. Despite the fact that we loved each other, and I spend much more time at her place than she did at my hole-in-the-wall efficiency, that was a rough first six weeks. We argued over the usual use of bathroom and toiletries issues. But we were also worried that this wasn’t going to work, that our financial situation would get worse, and that with only my meager income to depend on, we’d get evicted.

The worse of it was the week of January 25 in ’99. Because of the holidays, I hadn’t been paid in a month, and the only income we had until my first Duquesne paycheck for that semester — which was that Friday, the 29th — was my partial unemployment check of $131.29 per week. I paid rent for January with that, leaving us $5 to work with and about two days’ worth of food at home that week. I clung to $1.50 so that I could take the bus in from East Liberty to Duquesne to teach my class that week. Otherwise, I walked everywhere in the snow, just like I had in the worst of times when I was a grad student. My girlfriend must’ve cried three or four times that week because of the stress. I wasn’t surprised, given her middle class upbringing. I just hoped that she’d hold it together without me having to give yet another pep talk that was as much about keeping my spirits up as they were about hers.

We ate spaghetti on Monday and Tuesday, the sauce a watered down version of Hunts spaghetti sauce-in-a-can. I made instant mashed potatoes with homemade gravy on Wednesday, and fried dough that passed as pancakes for breakfast and dinner on Wednesday and Thursday respectively. The hardest part for my significant other was not having milk at home. Over the years, I’ve gotten used to and made fun of her, as she has said, “Eek! No milk!” with the whine of an eight-year-old about 500 times. But she did have a box of instant milk that her mother had given her three years earlier, which barely helped her get through the middle of that week.

That was the worse of it for us, when we had nearly $95,000 in debt and a combined projected income of $7,000 that year. I was paying my student loans on an income-sensitive payment plan of $20 per month, meaning that Noah’s grandkids would be my age by the time it would’ve been paid off. I still had my Amex card, but even with me using it sparingly, it was suspended because I didn’t pay that month. I couldn’t have been worse off if I had stayed at 616 after high school.

The winds of change, though, were already at work through a combination of some prayer, hard work, and opportunities. The following week would yield my first interview for a meaningful full-time job in eighteen months. I eventually interviewed for jobs at Tufts, Colgate, NYU, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, and Presidential Classroom in DC, not counting phone interviews. I reassembled what at one point was a lost panel presentation for a major historical conference in Toronto, my first “international” trip. By May, my girlfriend had found temp work, at Carnegie Mellon of all places, and by June, I was teaching at Duquesne and had taken a job with Presidential Classroom in the DC area. I proposed in August, we moved to suburban DC a few days later, and found ourselves climbing out of debt by the second half of 2000.

It was hard, but given what we learned about ourselves, it was worth it. Times may be hard now, for us and for others, but they won’t always be that way, especially if you can see beyond where you are now. It’s the difference betweeen success, survival and suicide.

Last Thursday was officially MLK’s birthday. If he had somehow lived, not been brutally executed, survived the stress of his conversion of the Civil Rights Movement into a class and human rights struggle, the loss of friends and political support, the conservative shift of the country, not to mention his marriage, infidelities and children, he would be eighty years old as of now. Over the past year, and especially the past three months, all pundits and people have talked about are the glowing connections between King and Obama, between dream and dream fulfilled. I just don’t see it that way — I guess I already showed that with my posting last Thursday.

My wife reminded me of Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks, an episode in which Dr. King had awaken from a coma to find himself in the late ’00s. His slow, methodical, preacher’s style of oratory wouldn’t have made it in a sound-bite driven era. His views on race, class, and other rights may have kept up or may not have, but either way, he would’ve been marginalized had he lived to this day. We would likely only bring King out on occasion, to remind ourselves of whatever we think he represents, kind of the way Muhammad Ali or John Hope Franklin gets treated these days. King certainly wouldn’t have a holiday named after him had he lived. So for folks who are constantly jawing about wouldn’t it have been great for King to have seen this day, it’s a bittersweet notion if we take that thought to its logical conclusion.

So, for all of the polling on Blacks and our much more positive views of race relations since Election Day, it’s really about euphoria. Plain and simple. I know, I’m guilty as charged myself. Obama’s election is a big step forward, a symbol of what America can do and be. And we — Black, White, Brown and Yellow — should and are celebrating Obama’s inauguration as if our best friend was elected president. But with all of this, Obama really is only a symbol. All of this will mean little in the everyday lives of poor people, especially the poor of color, of marginalized groups such as undocumented workers, gays and lesbians, Muslims and others if Obama merely remains a symbol. Or worse, turns out only to be as good a president as say, Bill Clinton.

I know that many folks my age and older think I’m an ingrate. Even with me laying out my story, telling some of my most private memories in heart-wrenching detail, there are those of you who’ll say, “How dare you!” As if the actions and ideas of the Civil Rights Movement are sacred, forever sacrosanct because of King’s blood, Medgar Evers’ blood, Malcolm X’s blood, even John Lewis’ blood. I realize that I couldn’t say anything to those completely wrapped in the bedsheets of the ’60s that would justify my “On Being An Unspecial American” dispatches. There more people like you than me, unfortunately, so I have to live with that.

Still, I must say what I have to say. I don’t think that the sufferings and struggles of the Civil Rights Movement benefited me in any substantial way. The symbols of the movement helped shape my thinking and relative optimism growing up. But the fruits of the movement never penetrated down to my family, my siblings or me. The Civil Rights Movement didn’t end poverty, or discrimination based on poverty intertwined with race. It didn’t change much the perceptions of my teachers when it came to my abilities or possibilities. To a person, if you asked most of my teachers between elementary school and college what they thought of my potential, they would’ve seen me as a nobody or as an underachiever who somehow just didn’t try hard enough. Most of my professors in the History Department at Pitt didn’t even want me in grad school, much less expect me to earn my degrees. My job search wasn’t aided by affirmative action, my publications by the mere fact that I needed a hand up and not a handout.

The sad fact is, often the hardest people to break through to were Blacks who did benefit from the Civil Rights Movement in real, tangible ways. The undertold story of the movement was how MLK’s death spurred government hiring of white-collar Blacks, colleges hiring Black professors and administrators, private philanthropic efforts at improving schools and eradicating poverty, corporate hiring of Blacks for human resources positions, and so on. These were the first fully professional African Americans I encountered outside of the classroom after finishing high school. Many of them found their initial jobs in that post-’68 window of efforts to realize the movement. By the time I met these folks, that optimism had long passed, in their organization or college, in their actions toward me, and in their hearts and minds.

The great Derrick Bell, in his Faces at the Bottom of the Well, tells an allegorical tale about the use of symbols in America when it comes to race. His fictional character says, “he,” The Man, that is, “only gives you when it will do him the most good!” That was certainly true in the years between ’68 and ’79, when many of the Blacks I’ve met in my professional life got their start and positions of gatekeeping influence or power. Of all of my work and post-high school educational experiences, these tended to be the worst. These folk were often too busy hanging on to their relative positions of power to be a mentor or even a supervisor to me.

Some, like Joe Trotter or my former boss during my undergrad summers at Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health, were too envious of where they thought I was headed in life to do anything other than “run interference” on my behalf. Sabotage is a much more accurate term. Even now, in the midst of a career transition, shopping a book and teaching part-time, I come across folks who “marched with King” or whose parents “marched with King” who somehow think that the symbol of the man gives them carte blanche to be gatekeepers in the lives of other, younger professional Blacks. Of course, I’ve met, worked for and with, and been friends with Whites and Latinos who have the same gatekeeping mentality around the Civil Rights Movement and race. It’s obviously unfair, but they’re also delusional, which makes for interesting conversation — which I’ll discuss in another blog.

I don’t need anyone to tell me to suck it up or make more of an effort than I already am. No duh, right? All I’m saying is that the current talk about going from Dream Deferred to Dream Fulfilled is something close to bs. Yes, for the Obamas, it’s Dream Fulfilled. But not all of us have dreams to be president. In fact, I’m certain that King didn’t foresee this reality when he gave his “I Have A Dream” speech in ’63. King’s dream, which has many interpretations, was as simple as it was complicated. To see the day when ordinary people could have and fulfill their ordinary aspirations and lead ordinary lives without the scourge of racism and racists to take that away from them. Anything else, even in all its extraordinary spectacle, is symbolism of what could be.

At eighty years and four days since MLK was born, far more than twenty percent of his work has been fulfilled. I doubt, though, we’re at eighty percent fulfillment of the Civil Rights Movement, or any other movement for that matter. At least twenty percent of us can and should only see the past forty plus years as a partial fulfillment, the rest being symbols that we can cash in one day, and hopefully soon. Certainly President Obama can help move all of us there in using his office as much more than a symbol, but only if hold his feet to the fire the same way we did with W in his last three and a half years in office. I remain hopeful, but I also remain watchful.

Imagine a day that was so cold that when the temperature rose to -20 c (that’s -4 degrees F) three days later, it felt like a heat wave. A day that produced multiple states of emergency for much of the country. A day where you windows had thick sheets of ice on their panes, and your breath turned into icicles before you started to take in air. 

Post-Racial. Does anyone know what this really means? If the 2008 election cycle showed anything, it was that President-Elect Barack Obama embodied something that can’t be easily defined. Not with “Black,” “biracial” or even “post-racial.” Sixty-seven million Americans might’ve been ready for a new African American president. But most Americans—media folk included—have no clue about what they mean when they say post-racial.

Americans aren’t quite as far along as Obama in turning the page to a post-racial world. We still have politicians who think it’s okay to parody the President-Elect as “Barack the Magic Negro” or paint Latinos with a broad brush with “The Star Spanglish Banner.” We don’t deliberately call ourselves Black while acknowledging our White heritage, blurring both in the process. We don’t usually label ourselves biracial without privileging our Whiteness, which is normal for folks who are biracial with one White parent. We’re not colorblind, and yet we’re not completely blinded by color either. No, what Obama has demonstrated is that a post-racial world isn’t a place where one’s race is something to transcend. It’s a world where we get to do much of the defining of who we are, of how we describe ourselves in terms of race and ethnicity. It’s a messy process now, one not easy to get a handle on.

Still, it’s where we all need to go if we’re going to turn the page on the ’60s, on old and worn definitions of race and race relations. For starters, a post-racial world is one where those of us who didn’t “march with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” no longer have to kneel at the altar of the church of the Civil Rights Movement to give homage. After all, did King have to praise Booker T. Washington or Harriet Tubman for their sacrifices at all of his marches before taking us into a new racial reality? This post-racial future really begins when the old Civil Rights establishment relinquishes its claim to represent all Blacks. Especially those of us born after 1964.

A post-racial world is one where “the ’60s” no longer influences our conversation about race, social justice activism or racial politics. It’s a place where those of us from Generation X and Y no longer have to face constant reminders from Baby Boomers about all of their political—and sometimes illegal—activities to change “the system.” Or Baby Boomer accusations of apathy and historical blindness, as if their work on social justice and civil rights is the only work that matters. Last I checked, the radicalism of the ’60s ushered in an era of divisive identity politics and unleashed a neoconservative movement hellbent on rolling back wonderful ’60s ideas like affirmative action and the Great Society.

A post-racial world is one where the media no longer uses terms like “the Black community,” “the African-American community,” or “minorities.” These are tired phrases, ones that have lost all meaning over the past four decades. They merely represent the way the media treated all prominent Blacks they interviewed, as if they could singlehandedly stand in for millions of other African Americans. Or for all other persons of color for that matter. There are 40 million Blacks in the US. Not to mention another 60 million Latino, Asian and Native Americans and other groups of color. No one person, organization, neighborhood or “community” can claim to represent all of our struggles, successes or ideas, not forty years ago, and certainly not now.

A post-racial America is one where we can still claim discrimination and bigotry. But we must make damn sure that we have the evidence to back up our claims. No more complaints about exclusion, no more insinuations of reverse racism, no more excuses for individuals engaged in ridiculous or criminal behavior. Being post-racial doesn’t mean that identity politics should end or that discrimination is over. It means, though, that all of us should take a moment to breathe before picking a joker from the race card deck.

The same is true of excuses made by ’60s-era liberals and conservatives for the disadvantaged among us. Those excuses don’t fly in a post-racial America. Crime, gangs, drugs, poverty, inadequate education, housing and healthcare. They are as much a product of class inequality—as most poor people in America are White—as they are of racial inequality. “The Man” may be the problem, but “The Man’s” issue these days is greed, or economic bigotry. To say, though, that “the poor will be with us always” is a sorry excuse for doing nothing. It’s a conservative “Oh, well” to growing economic inequality and a justification of it, akin to Hinduism’s caste system of Untouchables. Both are worn-out ideas that do nothing to improve the lives of all Americans, regardless of race and class, and have no place in our post-racial world.

I think I can speak for many from my generation and my younger siblings’ generation when I say that we have grown tired of all of the posturing and rabid arguments that have gone on for the past forty years. We know that a post-racial America isn’t one that’s all about the Black-White nexus, affirmative action or welfare. It’s about redefining who we are as Americans and creating the means necessary for us to see race without making race a big deal. This is hardly the end game for defining post-racial. It’s just a starting point.