What I have been getting all day, indeed, all year is questions about how I should be happy about Obama, how I should be proud of him, how this is some triumph for black people. I find it offensive that you chalk up the differences between Obama and me is merely DNA. Black people are not all the same. Black people from from South America, from Africa, from America, from Europe, and from Caribbean are not all the same. In fact, many of us clash living, working, and learning side by side. I gather from your comments that we all look the same to you, but we actually have our own very distinct cultures and experiences. I do not doubt that Obama had his own brushes with racism. I never questioned that. Obama has something that I will never have: a an ancestry that does not begin on a plantation. My hair is curlier than Obama's, but when he looks in the mirror he knows that it is from a sexual encounter to which both parties consented. I imagine that I got my hair through a violent act having been perpetrated on one of my female ancestors. If you are not a black person, then I would not expect you to understand why it is troubling to see the fruits of sexual violence staring back at you in the mirror. I do not expect you to understand what it is like to know what it is like to have someone throw slavery in your face, especially when it is your own face doing it. As for the t-shirt, I actually saw it at a mall in New York. You can snort at it all you like, but if you were a black American in the actual sense of being a black American, could you really challenge the premise? Sure it is hateful and there are no cotton plantations tended to by slaves, there is a grain of truth.

I have tried my best to wrap my head around this whole thing. I have not called anyone phony the way Holden Caulfield did. I think this outpouring of joy and emotion is genuine. I believe that Oprah's tears, Jesse Jackson's tears, the tears of students at historically black colleges, and Condi's tears were genuine. I am just confused by it. YOU may not be personally asking me to understand, but I cannot tell you how many friends, relatives, and complete strangers think that I am out of my mind or some sort of Uncle Tom because I do not see Obama's victory as my own and as a triumph for black people. I am isolated and alienated because my people, black people, are in a state of rapture and jubilee and I am outside of that. What they see as a huge gain, I see as a loss.

Black people may have overplayed their hand by calling Obama's historic victory a huge step for blacks. Are my people so blind? How will this remedy crumbling schools, de facto segregation, out of control rates of incarceration, drugs in our communities, violence, and black on black crime? There are many black people who became part of the political process because of Obama, but the overwhelming majority of black people are living in reality. Obama's achievement will result in exceptionalism. Now, blacks will have to shoulder all of the blame for the problems we face because we have crowned Obama our savior and the powers that be will say "if Obama made it, then so should you." Talking about his victory in terms of success of black Americans in diaspora is not helpful, it is damaging.

I can understand Democrats rejoicing at a Republican defeat. I would have been unhappy had McCain won. But you must admit that the reactions last night were more than glee over the end of the Bush era.

You say Obama has gone into details about policy in his "hope," "yes we can," and "change we can believe in," addresses, but I have no heard it. Why no discussion of what programs will have to be slashed? I hear him saying he is going to pay for every budget increase with ending some programs or making some programs more efficient. Which programs would this be? Ending the war in Iraq will not happen overnight and even if it did, that would only put 120 billion dollars back in our coffers. Obama is promising broad tax cuts for the overwhelming majority of Americans, while promising many new entitlements. I wish he had been honest about that and offered some specifics. I happen to think it would not have mattered because he already had his fanatics by the time he was accused of being boring in the second debate. Do you honestly believe people caught the holy ghost because of Obama's plan for social security or monetary policy? I doubt it.

Obama has elbowed people like me out of the way. I do not think he owes me or anyone anything. But, he is not part of me or the legacy of the unique subgroup that is American blacks. Our culture was spun from whole cloth on this land and our psychic wounds are different and deeper.

I will be interested to see what happens to my fellow black people when the last of the confetti is swept from the floor of the inaugural ball and Obama has to get down to the business of governing. They will have to return to the grim reality of what it is to be black in America, Obama will fumble, and I will laugh. The idea of Obama and his groupies realizing that he cannot, in fact, part the seas is tantalizing. When real life imposes itself on black people again, I may well be invited back into the fold. Sadly, it will be because of yet another broken promise and the subprime mortgaging of dreams that will be foreclosed upon.