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Submitted by SoDebNair

This moment is so tremendous, and I still really have not truly felt the full impact of the fact that my President truly is a black man. Although I voted for change, and not for race, the impact of this moment is not lost upon me, or on any person of minority status or of brown skin color in these United States of America. Still, while it is fresh, let me share with you what is going through my mind.

My parents are human rights advocates. My father is passed, but they both have always stood up for the rights of humans – of all races, orientations, creeds and colors. My grandmothers verbally remembered cotton fields and the picking thereof to their grandchildren. My generation is not that far removed from indentured servitude, slavery, disenfranchisement, denial of civil rights and the fight to when freedom from each and every one of those conditions. Last night, my mother ran to the street and danced with her great and great-great grandchildren.

Never did she believe that she would experience anything like this in her lifetime, nor in the lifetime of her children. Never did she realize when she was marching with Martin, or when they were shepherding us girls to my grandmas house and going back to defend our homes and neighborhood in the black and white riots that marked the late 60’s and early 70’s; never did she think when she marched in downtown Columbus for the rights of women with babies and single young men to receive assistance from the government; or when she supported the right of humans to chose their own life paths; never did she fathom that when she opened her doors, repeatedly, to the next child, the next friend, the next human, in need of help, that she would see the day when a brown faced man would galvanize a rainbow colored constituency to cast a democratic ballot and a vote for change that would resonate the dream of Martin Luther King as a fact, not just a pretty speech.

Now me – when I took my nieces and nephews to visit every civil rights or African American museum I could get them to; when we travelled to Atlanta to view Ebenezer Baptist Church, the house in which Martin Luther King, Jr. lived as a child; when we visited the water-encircled burial site of Dr. King; when I stood on the actual ground of land where civil rights were fought for – and even the land where my great grandparents initially lived inside of the flood wall (where the colored people lived) always in jeopardy of being overtaken by the water; never at any of those moments did my mind encircle the possibility that I could wake up as a young black woman and say, ‘good morning, my President is black’.

As my family all gathered at my Mom’s house last night, already hype because of the even the theoretical ideology that this presidential race supported - that America really is a place where change is possible; really is the land of opportunity; where opportunity is something that chooses you, and you just have to stand up in the moment, we still were nervous and hesitant to believe in this American dream. When the numbers started rolling in, I sat on my Mom’s pretty mauve ‘this is a lady’s house’ sofa, with my niece’s 2 month old grandson asleep on my stomach, and reveled in the idea that destiny is his to take. As the Electoral College cast ballot after ballot in support of then-Senator Barack Husain Obama, doors of possibilities were opening wide for my great-great nephew, while he slept. As I cussed my nieces, nephews, and my own kids, because they danced hard and sang loud (you know Mary’s kids know what this thing sure nuff means, down to the littlest) I was still numb about what was happening at this very moment. We are history. We are now written in the chronicles of American History as the generation who said ‘yes we can’, and then went out and did it.

This morning, I told my daughter to go to school and work harder, told my son to speak clearly and walk with his back taller, told myself to come into this organization and do my job extraordinarily well – because these are the characteristics of our race, and this is how you behave so that you can step into the land of giants, and take the land.

I know as the sheer magnitude of this moment manifests as reality; as the work ahead dampens the excitement and furor of the joy at hand; as the dark underbelly of the nation raises her ugly head in protest; I will have other thoughts, other realizations, and other moments to share. But for right now – I am Elizabeth, daughter of Theodore and Mary, Granddaughter of Elizabeth and Robert; Marguerite and Paul – and my President is Black.