(Akiit.com) It was truly a powerful feeling to watch history in the making.

Some said it could never occur, but it did.

A Black man was elected president of the United States, a place where racism is as entrenched as baseball, hot dogs and apple pie.

The mere election of Barack Obama to president means that things have changed.

There are a few things that we can speculate on in never ending circles, but there had to be change in order for such a thing to occur.

Amongst those changes are the throngs of young voters who believe that the world can change and become better.

The change that they are focusing on is the independent thinking and action of a man who is tied by blood to the majority race as well as the most oppressed minority race, and so is perhaps best able to represent the broadest base of interests of the nation.

And it took a real shift in attitude and racial perspective to make that happen.

I believe the world will recognize this shift and accordingly, hate America less.

The world will view America with less loathing knowing that it opened the highest office in the land to a member of the once lowest group of the oppressed. That view will make the nation less hypocritical when it judges the actions of other nations in its self-appointed job of world police.

Those changes are real and are already taking place.

But in this election, there was another crucial change.

For the first time in my lifetime, white people came together with people of color to effect real change.

I know this because people of color didn’t and perhaps couldn’t have created the climate of change alone.

This event took the cooperation of everyone.

Remember—Obama didn’t beat McCain by any small margin, but by a landslide victory.

That victory was real and the unified effort it took was also real.

In the coming months, the nation will reveal its true self based on the expectations of the new president and his actions after taking the oath of office.

For whites who hold on to racist ideas and expectations, the belief is that America has finally made good on a promissory note of equality and it’s very founding premise that “All men are created equal.” For them, no other actions have to take place, because all things are now level and fair in their eyes.
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(Akiit.com) Barack Obama’s candidacy has changed forever the landscape of America because now all parents, regardless of race, can say to their children that if you work hard and sacrifice, study and help others, you can become President.

That is an amazing testament to the transformational character of Obama’s White House run.

And the country as a whole should be proud because Obama’s candidacy was never truly hobbled or engulfed by the issue of race. Instead, the American people adhered to the Rev. Martin Luther King’s standard that a man be judged by the content of his character rather than the color of his skin.

Some will argue that Obama’s candidacy represents the official beginning of a “postracial” era in America, where neither race nor civil rights claims are relevant. Others will claim that Obama now trumps whatever cards I and other civil rights leaders may possess.

Such arguments misread the racial tea leaves swirling through America. The fact remains that, although the nation is willing to make important and laudatory exceptions to the “race rule,” it still exists. African-Americans are not treated equally as a people and must struggle for equality every day. This doesn’t change after Obama’s remarkable run.

Consider that a recent national poll showed that 40% of white people held a negative view of African-Americans as a people. This view will not disappear because of Obama, and should he struggle going forward, those negative views against blacks would rise dramatically.

Further, the issues that stoke the smoldering embers beneath the discussion of race and racism are still with us even while Obama soars. Just last year, hangman nooses dotted the countryside of the very states that Obama campaigned in so effectively. The tragedy of Sean Bell, the innocent man gunned down by police, happened during this election season. The Jena 6 case (in which black teenagers were treated much more harshly than their white counterparts despite causing similar mischief) and the Genarlow Wilson case (in which a teenager got a prison sentence for having oral sex with a fellow teenager) are both signs of an unequal justice system slow to change.
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(Akiit.com) Upon his election in 1992, Bill Clinton — affectionately referred to as the nation’s first black president — asked Maya Angelou to compose a poem and read it at his inauguration. Angelou feels a new poem welling up inside her following Barack Obama’s election, but she does not expect another command performance.

“I’m sure Mr. Obama, president-elect, will have them bring his own poet,” the 80-year-old writer said Friday from her home in Winston-Salem, where she holds a professorship at Wake Forest University. “I was somebody else’s poet.”

Angelou raised some eyebrows when she decided to support Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary over a fellow African-American. But when Clinton withdrew, the writer threw her support behind Obama, “thumping the drum” on his behalf and introducing his wife, Michelle, at an event in Greensboro in September.

The poet and author of such books as “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” said she had a visceral, physical reaction when Obama was declared the winner late Tuesday.

“First I laughed,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “Before I could finish laughing, I wept. Then I shook. I mean, I trembled. You know, the old meaning of the word `thrill’ has a physical aspect. It’s like, `Brrrrr!’ My body started shaking.”

But the experience was also cerebral. Images of slavery and the civil rights movement and of her slain friend Martin Luther King Jr. raced through her mind, and in that moment, she realized that the United States was finally “growing up.”

“I thought of my people, African-Americans. I thought of white Americans. I thought of Asians and Spanish people. And I thought, `My God! What a country. What a country.’ I believe that in the secret heart of every American there’s a desire to live in a great country. And look at us now.”
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(Akiit.com) President Barack Obama must immediately undertake four priorities if he is going to fulfill his promise of changing this nation from the downward economic and social spiral which Bush administration policies, Wall Street greed and neo-conservative war mongering set in motion.

Priority #1 - End the unnecessary, immoral and illegal (under-international-law) war in Iraq. Within the next year, take the more than $10 billion a month being spent on that disastrous war and return it to America to be used for the benefit of struggling American citizens, especially those currently faced with the prospect of losing their homes.

Priority #2 - Use some of the Iraq war funds to launch a 10-year, $50 billion per year economic development program designed to revitalize inner city America. The inner cities can only be saved with a massive infusion of capital which builds businesses (especially minority owned), creates descent-paying manufacturing jobs and rewards promising teachers and students for academic success.

Priority #3 - Repeal President Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and re-direct that money to provide tax relief to the middle classes. Poverty increased during virtually every year of the Bush administration and the income/wealth gaps between the rich and the middle classes also increased. According to a United Nations report released last month, America has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world. This must end.

Supply-side economic policies which say make the rich richer and maybe some of that wealth will “trickle down” to the rest of us must be abandoned.

Priority #4 -Avoid any more unnecessary wars. Resist all pressure to go war with Iran. We are told Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon. Even if we are being told the truth by the same people who lied about weapons of mass destruction being in Iraq, so what?

The United States has an estimated 5,000 nuclear warheads. According to former President Jimmy Carter, Israel has 300 nuclear weapons. But we are told if Iran gets just one nuclear weapon within the next 5 to 10 years, it is a threat to Israel and we may have to go to war with Iran in order to protect Israel. This argument is absolutely ridiculous. Israel is actually a greater threat to Iran than Iran is to Israel. No more wars!
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(Akiit.com) Sometimes when you are in the midst of watching an historic event unfold, you don’t know what or how to feel, such was the case for me as I watched the culmination of what was nothing short of miraculous, an African-American male became the 44th president of the United States. As the build up to the election approached I could not help but think of how men like D.W. Griffith (Birth of a Nation) must be turning in their graves at what is taking place in their beloved country, while the restless souls of the thousands of nameless people who lost their lives during the middle passage to this country in cargo ships, discarded overboard like trash, those souls of individuals who did nothing wrong except be born with the wrong skin color and were hung from trees or the internal and external wounds inflicted on the freedom riders, how they must have danced and shouted at this monumental occurrence.

In between answering the barrage of text messages I received from my athletes, friends, and family my feelings were put on ice, I wish there was something in me that could produce tears of gladness, but alas there were none, there was just this sense of surreal numbness and a discreet pessimistic eye watching the TV screen as the poll numbers kept streaming by, I was anticipating something or someone to come in and pull the plug on the entire festive moment, any moment someone was going to come on the air and say” wait a minute we have a recall or large numbers of voter fraud have been discovered” the next president elect is not Barack but John McCain.
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