...and one can't deny it, and shouldn't, as James Taranto laid out simply today:
"The 2008 election proves that our country has made a lot more racial progress over the past few decades than many people thought it had as recently as a couple of days ago.
At one time--let us say 1964, before the passage of the Voting Rights Act--it would have been fanciful to suggest that America could elect a black president. Forty-four years later, America has done just that. At some point along the way, a barrier fell.
We would argue that the barrier fell decades ago--that by the 1980s, or the '90s at the latest, antiblack bias had receded to the point that the right black candidate could have been elected. There is no way to prove this, of course, but today no one can deny that the barrier fell by 2008. (Tomorrow we'll have some thoughts on why Barack Obama turned out to be "the right black man.") This is important, above all, because it proves to black Americans in a way nothing else could that this country is theirs as much as it is anyone else's."
Don't forget that two out of our first three presidents--George Washington and Thomas Jefferson--owned African-American men. Surely they never imagined that a black man would be president.
