He could do for black Americans what JFK did for Irish CatholicsWASHINGTON, D.C. -- Caleah Cain has already booked off Jan. 20, 2009, from her job in a call centre here. Cain, 32, who is African-American, never paid much attention to the cyclical pomp that comes with living in the same town as the president of the United States, but next inauguration day may be different.
"I think it's incredible that this might happen," Cain said, standing two blocks from the White House with her husband, Aaron, and one-year-old daughter, Jade.
"I want to be here to see every minute of that day."
If Barack Obama is elected president of the United States, inauguration day will be the beginning of a scrapbook of historic firsts that will represent a significant change in the local landscape for the 65 per cent majority of the District of Columbia who are black.
"We've been telling our three daughters they can be anything they want to be since they were old enough to hear it," Cain said. "And this would make it more than just talk."
D.C., like most government towns, is divided between the postcard monuments to power and the "real" city that subsists in different measures on the care and feeding of that power.
But this government town is also divided by race, with downtown D.C. integrated from nine to five and people retreating after work to their socially segregated corners of Northwest for whites, Southeast for blacks and various equally divided suburbs. There are mixed areas both urban and suburban that defy the divisions, but they're still so notable for being mixed that you can easily name them.
For all the predominantly black institutions that have thrived in what was once called Washington's "Secret City" for the past 40 years, the prospect of a black president presiding over not just the leadership of the free world, as the cliche goes, but playing the role that links the White House to the "real D.C." -- lighting the national Christmas tree, hosting the White House Easter egg roll and tying up traffic with his 40-car motorcade -- holds huge cultural significance here.
"It'll give the African-American population here motivation and inspiration," said Cain's husband, Aaron, a network engineer, also 32. "It will help bridge the gap that has always existed between the two D.C.s."
If the Obama family moving into what so many black Washington comedians have dubbed the whitest house in America were the premise for a sequel to The West Wing, the challenge for the writers would be not to get too mawkish. Obama would be the first black president, and the first black family, to move into a White House built by slaves, to which Booker T. Washington was the first African American ever invited, in 1901 on the success of his book, Up from Slavery.
McGill University history professor and presidential historian Gil Troy, who is spending the summer as a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, compares the cultural impact for African-Americans of Obama occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to what John F. Kennedy's arrival in the White House did for America's Irish Catholics.
"The Kennedys' moving into the White House in 1961 was a cultural bombshell. You had this beautiful, glamourous young couple with small adorable children plus the Kennedy mythology behind it. For Irish Catholics, it meant, 'we made it.' "
For Obama, Troy says, that pride may be tempered by the weight of enormous expectations.
"There will be, as there always is, a downturn after the initial honeymoon, and it will be a test of the African-American community as to whether they can deal with him being treated like anybody else."
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, across the Anacostia River, on one of those blindingly sunny days that make Washington feel like L.A. with brains, Yanne Givens is waiting for her summer daycampers to board a school bus. Givens, 24, a substitute teacher in the D.C. public school system, says the second graders she teaches idolize Obama.
"They talk about him the same way they talk about major sports figures," she laughs.
"And they need someone to look up to -- there's a lot of poverty in this city and a lot of hopelessness that goes with it. He's going to have a lot to live up to."
