I think we can all agree that yesterday we witnessed an historic election. For the first time in our nation’s democracy we overcame questions of gender and race in our presidential candidates. In 1992, neoconservative philosopher and economist Francis Fukuyama gained notoriety with his essay, “The End of History,” and later book THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN, where he carried forward Hegel and Marx’s idea that history was the progression of political struggle. Fukuyama posited that Western liberal democracy marked the utopia of political thought and signaled the end of this progression and thus the end of history.
When teaching the history of minority groups, and especially African Americans, it’s often said that the words Thomas Jefferson put to velum in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” was not something set in stone, but a goal. At the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr., said he dreamed that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed”. So, to borrow from Fukuyama’s scaffolding, I’d like to ask what the election of Barack Obama will mean to the future of African American history. If African American history has told of the struggle to achieve equity in American society, did we reach that point in yesterday’s election?
Will the election change the way our students think about African-American history? Will it change how we teach the subject? Does this mean that we’ve moved past the multicultural into a fully post-ethnic society, or perhaps that we’ve even transcended the post-ethnic? Or is race even the issue? Did Americans turn out to elect the “first African American” president, or was this a rejection of the Reagan-era supply-side conservative Republicanism that George W. Bush claimed as his political heritage? Or was it a reaction against the economic downturn that is affecting the nation? If voters flocked to Obama because he is black that is one thing, but it says something completely different if he won because he was the Democratic nominee. Was his nomination and election a result of the “novelty” of an African-American candidate?
As I watched Obama’s election celebration last night, and saw John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, and heard about 106 year-old Ann Nixon Cooper, I thought of the changes African Americans have seen in the past century, the past 50 years, and the past decade. I remember watching public service announcements for the United Negro College Fund on television emphasize the phrase, “The mind is a terrible thing to waste.” I was especially moved by a grandfather putting his grandson on a school bus. The older man encouraged the younger boy to study and do well in school and one day he might become a doctor. The young boy looked up at his grandfather and asked why he didn’t go to college. Of course, the unspoken message was that race and poverty prevented the grandfather from realizing his dreams. Will Obama’s election affect the question of the future of Affirmative Action? Does his election mean that we’ve moved beyond race as a determining issue, much as we look to John Kennedy’s election as Americans’ willingness to overlook his Catholicism? Have we now moved beyond race as an issue? How will students consider race relations in American history from now on? One African American woman said last night that she went to the polls with her grandchildren and could now honestly tell them that anyone of them could grow up to be president. Did the election make manifest the goals of MLK’s Dream, and the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement?
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