Mutt

One moment in President-elect Obama’s maiden news conference Friday jarred me slightly—that reference to getting his daughters a puppy from a rescue shelter, what he called ‘a mutt, like me!’ We wouldn’t have heard that line during the campaign as his team studiously avoided the topic of race and kept the focus on the universality of his proposals.

It was both self-deprecating and oddly revealing, a throw-away line that made me ask myself how the topic of race might have been handled in the Obama childhood family among the white grandparents, the half-Indonesian sister and the Hawaiian neighbors. Did they joke about the tonal variety among themselves? Did they make light of people’s occasional discomfort and the insensitive comments that Barack undoubtedly encountered growing up in Kansas and elsewhere?

We’ll probably experience a lot of moments like this as we get used to having a president and a first family who don’t look like the portraits on the White House walls. It won’t be the same as tuning into the Cosby Show or watching a parade of multihued entertainers sit on the sofa with Leno and Letterman. For white Americans it won’t be an exercise in tolerance or inclusion or feeling liberal and magnanimous about ourselves because we won’t have the option of turning to another channel or retreating into a comfort zone of familiarly Caucasian faces.

Barack Obama is going to be our president. People can dislike the president, denounce the president, mock him or hate his guts—hey, I’ve been doing that my whole adult life. But whatever we think or do, it’ll still be his black face looking down at us in the post office and his appointees’ signatures appearing on our tens and twenties. Starting in January we won’t have a choice about living with that every one of the next one thousand, four hundred and sixty days.

That’s radical.