R&B Nation

Every four years on Inauguration Day, the winners descend on Washington, D.C. This time around, it was young adults and African-American families.

That’s my unscientific measure of the 2 million people who gathered in the nation’s capital Tuesday, and it pretty much sums up my impression of who is taking charge of our future. I haven’t seen any estimates in published accounts so far, but to anyone on the street it was pretty obvious that blacks had poured out to celebrate the Obama Moment and comprised a hefty percentage of the attendees—I would say close to half.

I remember when the rich white people took over during the first Reagan inauguration in 1981, a festival of fur and blinding blonde up-dos that augured the coming shift to unapologetic selfishness. No more Carteresque, populist moments like the casual stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue re-enacted Tuesday by Barack and Michelle—Reagan’s day was all about the full celebration of elite power and clubby, neo-royalist exclusivity.

Having lived in Washington for many years during and after college, I can attest to the fact that the city shifts its mood and habits with the reigning powers as befits a factory town—the factory being the machinery of state. I can further testify that having the Democrats in power is tons more fun.

That said, there is nothing to compare to the excitement of having the two Washingtons—one white-ish and official, the other black and often feeling like a foreign country or a barely tolerated colony—merge into one. We strolled along U Street on Monday night where hordes of mostly young people roamed about in the cold, some lining up outside Ben’s, the now-famous chili shack where the Obamas recently sampled the fare.

That nearly hysterical fascination for the First Family hasn’t been seen in Washington-the-city (as opposed to Washington-the-capital) in my memory. Ben’s had set up giant red, white and blue OBAMA letters sculpted in ice outside the door, which caused me to consider the fetishizing tendencies built into our presidential system. Since the Brits have a queen, they don’t fuss over their PMs—hard to imagine anyone building an ice sculpture to Gordon Brown.

As for the ceremony itself, there are plenty of eyewitness accounts, so I’ll only add a few laughs. For example, was Bill Clinton suffering from severe heartburn? The poor man has been eclipsed along with his entire generation and seems none too happy about it.

Reverend Warren spectacularly bombed in his lame revival of the Christian right’s family fetish. Aside from equating himself with Obama by enumerating both the president’s and his own children one by one, a grown man breathlessly uttering the names of little girls does not inspire confidence these days—even if he is a preacher. Especially if he is a preacher. Plus his prayer sucked. Let’s hope the Obama crew has learned that openness to adversaries shouldn’t include tolerance of insults and hateful speech.

Then there was Cheney in his wheelchair looking crumpled and unrepetant as he prepares for his imminent interview with Satan.

The marvelous touches provided to the overly solemn formalities by Aretha Franklin and Joseph Lowery were, to me, the highlights of the stage event. It’s hard to feel ‘history’ in the bones, but Franklin’s elegant styling of a tune we all learned in grade school about ‘my country’ spoke to the ironies of patriotism for people who were officially excluded from citizenship in such recent memory. At the end Lowery tackled the race taboo head-on and made us all laugh—none too soon.

In the end, though, Tuesday was about our long encounter with color and the national dementia that slavery generated as it required us to adopt schizophrenia as a founding ideology.

When I spent most of a year in Africa, the pressure of being the white guy was so exhausting that I promptly moved to the suburbs when I got back to remove myself from the categorizing glance. I had had enough of being saluted in Ghana with an Ashanti term dating from the colonial period that translates as ‘Sunday white man’ (apparently the Brits strolled about after church). There, I was white first and foremost and never allowed to forget it—not from any hostility but simple inability to see past my biological characteristics.

That episode suggests to me that African-Americans were experiencing and understanding the day not only with terrific pride but also perhaps a dosis of relief at the chance to be just folks. It will be quite a moment when Obama ceases to be the first black president because we have ceased to notice that particular detail. The young people who flocked to the Obama campaign and showed up to claim their victory on the streets of Washington grasped that kernel of post-identity wisdom, well before the rest of us.