This post has been edited for clarity.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has a Time column on what will happen if Obama loses the election:
So, yes, an Obama defeat would be greeted with a loud sucking of the teeth and a deepening of self-doubt. A loss would be hugely disappointing, and to put it crudely, it would also be more of the same. But it is also true that the biggest change has already taken place. The Obama campaign has been the anti--O.J. trial, a 24-hour ongoing drama about a black man cast not as a problem but, potentially, as the solution.
In some ways, I think this is the easier question to answer. The more interesting question is how black people will react if Obama wins.
I ask this question because a certain kind of black political identity has always had an oppositional streak, a healthy suspicion of American imperialism and a third-world consciousness. Mohammed Ali famously said that "I ain't got no quarrel with those Viet Cong, anyway. They never called me nigger." The flip-side of that is no black man ever gave the order for the United States to invade or bomb another country. If Obama wins, that will likely no longer be true.
This weekend I went to a show where they were selling t-shirts with Obama's face next to Martin Luther King Jr.'s. You can find these in every hood in America. One of the many varieties declares, "war is not the answer."
This is delusional. A President Obama will almost certainly take the kind of military action that black folks have long remained skeptical of. For the first time, it would be a black man giving that order. Black folks, by virtue of their unanimous support for Obama, and by having claimed him, will be responsible for those actions in a way we never have been before.
How will we react to that?
--A. Serwer
