Election day, 2008. After months of hand-wringing and check-writing, I arrive bright and early at the Obama headquarters in Ann Arbor only to be told that our county is awash in volunteers and that my time really would be better spent in Detroit. So I hop in our dented Camry and make my way to the city’s Obama Central, located in a dilapidated indoor shopping center on Grand River Avenue whose few remaining stores are devoted to the selling of Afrocentric tschochkes. I’m sent out with a burly African-American ex-Ford worker named David, with a list of street addresses at which to canvass. David knows some of these blocks and is not entirely happy with our assignment; nevertheless, off we go into a neighborhood where abandoned buildings (“crack houses?” I ask David; he makes a shushing gesture) abut neatly kept bungalows with heavy iron bars on the doors and windows.  I’m a little apprehensive—I am after all a classic well-meaning middle-class white person making my way into the notoriously underserved center of Detroit. But as we approach our first group of canvasees—a group of men gathered on the street, chatting pleasurably—we find ourselves greeted with smiles and good wishes. Our job is to give people information about where they can vote. It turns out that just about everyone we meet has already cast their ballots and that what they want to do is to tell us exactly where and when, in some cases to the hour and minute. This pattern holds for the rest of the day, as we make our way into lower-middle-class neighborhoods, Dave and I chatting happily about our choices in the primary (he was a Hillary backer, I an Obama fanatic). My favorite moment occurred near the end, when we arrived at the one house whose inhabitants hadn’t yet voted. They were waiting to depart on the front porch, a fortyish mother dragging her eighteen-year- old son to cast his first ballot while her sixteen-year-old daughter, in a cheerleader’s uniform, waved pom-poms on the porch.

Early December. I am at an academic conference in another depressed urban metropolis, New Haven, Connecticut.  I am talking with a sleek and self-assured younger English professor, dressed in coat and tie rather than the faux-casual mufti donned by the rest of the participants.  I am telling the story I detailed above, coating it in a little self-protective irony (I called it my “ebony-and-ivory” moment), but still happy and proud to have experienced it. But my conversation partner is having none of my positive vibe.  He reminds me that several political scientists have constructed algorithms that predict with a fair amount of accuracy the outcome of Presidential elections.  This one, he tells me, was baked in. So, he continues in a deliberately perverse mode, why waste time with canvassing?  He was happy with the results, but saw no need to contribute to an inevitable outcome.

These are the somewhat divergent lenses through which I have come to view the election of 2008. One of them—let’s sink into cliché and call it the rose-colored one—sees the event as being an exercise in the community organizing on a national scale, a sharp break with the divide-and-conquer tactics of a plutocracy that had so cynically used race and terror to cement its hold on the polity during the Bush years. The other lens is either clear or dark-tinted, depending on my mood.  It sees the Obama victory as inevitable—neither a result of a remarkable candidate nor a remarkable campaign, but a testimony to the extensiveness of the economic collapse last fall. Indeed, if it means anything, his victory paradoxically signals that racial division remains perdurable: although the final statistics haven’t been crunched, it seems that Obama significantly underperformed John Kerry in a broad swath of the country that roughly corresponds to Appalachia and the Deep South, areas where race relations have been historically tense, to put it mildly. This suggests that the old divide-and-conquer tactics haven’t disappeared; they’ve merely faded in the face of new demographics (the rise of Latino voters in the West, for example) and remain in place for use in future, less benign, coalitions.

Another way of thinking about these two different forms of response focuses on method, or, to be less academic about it, two competing ways of knowing the world.  One is experiential in nature and narrative in organization; it’s the way I tend to think and work naturally, which is why I ended up in an English department (albeit at the moment of the apotheosis of High Theory, now long passed, but that’s another story).  The other is the one my younger colleague invoked in his nod to the authority of the social sciences, which are usually governed by an inclination towards quantification, a gimlet-eyed approach to human behavior, a yearning for positive, concrete knowledge blocks.

Both of the binaries I’m adverting to here, however, turn out to be misleading, as the following essays suggest. I asked a number of people in a wide variety of fields, from my own of American literary and cultural studies through sociology, educational policy, political science, and history, to assess the Obama victory from their own disciplinary perspectives.  What emerged is fascinatingly complex and often unexpected. The social scientists (admittedly, ones who self-selected to write for a broad-based journal such as this one), demonstrate a range of reactions to the Obama phenomenon far more flexible and a range of stylistic resources far more extensive than one might have anticipated. Political scientist Donald Kinder’s essay suggests that there’s much more room for contingency, chance, happenstance in this victory than one would suspect; likewise, sociologist and education expert Prudence Carter brings a number of white and African-American voices to bear on the question of what the Obama victory means for racial equity as well as racial equality. Moreover, all the respondents, in whatever field, reflect a complex mixture of joy and worry. Giddy with delight as some are—I include myself in that number, and the excitement is still palpable in historian Tiya Miles’s celebratory response—they nevertheless also reflect an increasing sense of wariness and worry, with respect to not only the world Obama has inherited but also the facile notions of a postracial America that have circulated in the wake of his inauguration. In very different ways Eric Sundquist and Jonathan Rieder juxtapose Obama’s example and that of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement to suggest just how complex is his own sense of race—and that of the country he now leads. Beyond that sense, virtually all the issue’s respondents focus on the remaining social inequities not only to tell us how far we’ve come, but also to remind us how far we have to go.

A concluding vignette: the night of the election, I came home from a party just before eleven o’clock, when we all knew the final call was going to be made, to put my children to sleep.  I stayed up for Obama’s address in Grant Park, but turned it off soon after he began to speak.  An enormous wave of sadness swept over me.  For one thing, although he was clearly aiming for an air of Presidential gravitas, Obama looked older, tired, filled with a sense of the difficulties enmeshing the world he was now leading.  And I felt the same way: the world he is inheriting, and the one we are leaving to my sleeping children, is in a particular vise which even a politician of Obama’s skills and intellect may not be able to help us escape. Let’s call this situation the challenge of the real—of the translation of the ideals and energies of the campaign into the hard realities of governing; of dealing with facts on the ground and the competing interests of local, regional, international players; of responding to the trickiest and most complex economic situation since the Great Depression; of dealing with historical legacies of race that not even the election of an African-American can annul. 

Reflecting on Obama’s response to this challenge will occupy us for the next four to eight years, and indeed well beyond that. These contributions will, I hope, offer a beginning to that process.