He's Pretty. He's Black. He's ... Pretty Black?

OK, so now that the anticipation/excitement/anxiety of the 2008 Presidential Election has subsided a little bit (don't get me wrong, I still get the chills when I picture President Obama being sworn in), life has started to settle back into normalcy.

Or at least as normal as it be right now, what with the worst economic crisis (no-no, not a recession just yet!) of the past two generations, a lame-duck President STILL trying to fuck things up just so he can leave a legacy (don't worry, Dub, your legacy has been established many times over) and, on a personal note, an almost-three-year-old who seems to take great pleasure in pushing his mother and father to the brink of insanity on what seems like a daily basis.

Anyway, back to normalcy. Leading up to the election -- and still today -- the issue of race has been a big topic for discussion. I've heard people say they're worried that Obama is going to "black out" (imagine that, as he says the last phrase of the swearing in process, Barack's hair suddenly explodes into a giant, '70s blaxploitation-style Afro, he slaps the Bible five, then does a spin move, causing his Hartmarx suit to slide off revealing a purple pimp suit with one of those giant Africa pendants around his neck) as soon as he becomes President, and that whitey better be ready for some payback. Or some of the less extreme paranoid think he's going to "favor" Blacks in every decision he makes.

Funny thing is, race never even entered my mind over the entire course of the campaign. Not that I'm hoping for a medal, but I've always been conscious of race. ANd that's not to say I'm a racist, but in the past when I'd see a Black guy I'd think, "Oh, there's a Black guy." This is most likely due to the fact that I grew up in a small town that was mostly white (and whoever wasn't white was Mexican), went to a prep school that was 98% white and then went to a college for a year that was slightly less white, but not by much. But the somewhat culturocentric view that Obama was "different" and might somehow skew everything "Black" was never on my radar. He was neither Black, White nor Bi-racial; he was simply the Democratic Presidential candidate.

But today I started thinking about people voicing their thoughts, worries and opinions, and it make me think to myself, "Does the fact that this is news to me make me progressive, or just naive?" Of course, I don't think my failing to "classify" Obama makes me either progressive or naive. I choose to believe it's a sign that maybe I've evolved a little bit, and I'm better able to look at people as fellow people, not as ethnicities or races. I don't know if this shift in my world view has anything to do with Obama, but I already like the Change I've seen in myself.