For my generation, the timing was unexpected

President Obama. President Obama.

Even now, I’m struggling to find my footing on an altered terrain, a landscape where a black man can be elected president of the United States. It’s an exciting place, a hopeful and progressive place, but it’s unfamiliar. I didn’t expect to find myself here so soon.

Oh, I knew the nation would make the journey eventually, perhaps by 2020, I figured, when my 10-year-old niece and her cohort are frequent voters. They’ve grown up in a diverse world, with friends of every hue, with teachers and doctors and dentists of every color and creed, with gay parents at PTA meetings and interracial couples at church.

But my generation has seemed stuck in a different time and place, a place where race still matters —- a place where workplace desegregation is considered a civil right, where neighborhood diversity is accepted, but where social intermingling across color lines is cautious, limited and often contrived. And that’s among the educated affluent. The nation’s middle-age working class clings more tenaciously to rites of race and tribe.

So I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t believe it would happen. Not so soon.

Born in Alabama shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregated schools, I’ve grown accustomed to a steady but plodding course toward racial equality. Sometimes, I’ve been surprised by the speed with which this country has accomplished a social transformation so near complete —- from Jim Crow to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in 40 years. Other times, I’ve been depressed by the durability of stereotypes —- the readers who bring up race every time I mention poverty, as if the two are interchangeable, or the cultural commentators who seem to believe every accomplished black American has benefited from affirmative action.

So as recently as September, I didn’t believe my country would elect a black president. Not yet.

A student of social history, I have celebrated my country’s amazing journey toward the beloved community of which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke. I have acknowledged that America embraces its racial and ethnic diversity more readily than any other nation on the planet. From Rwanda to Russia, from Great Britain to Bosnia, heterogeneity breeds war or oppression or conflict. In the United States, by contrast, official policy and everyday practice favor pluralism.

Still, my generation (and my mother’s) cannot escape the pull of categorization by skin color. Devout Christians of different races rarely attend church together; 11 o’clock on Sunday mornings remains among the most segregated hours in America. Even death channels us along different paths to separate but equal funeral parlors and cemeteries. I confess, as well, that I have not overcome a perverse curiosity about ethnic heritage in the growing number of youngsters who defy easy racial categories. I frequently inquire about my niece’s friends: Is she black? White? Of color?

My niece, one of those category-defying kids herself, rarely knows the answer (and doesn’t always understand the question), so I knew my country would overcome this unhealthy obsession with ethnic antecedents in a generation or so. But I didn’t think we’d elect a black president just yet.

I knew Barack Obama was an extraordinary candidate. His biracial heritage gives him an easy familiarity with working-class whites that they sense and trust. That’s why he won over Illinois farmers in his Senate campaign. His rhetorical skills draw huge crowds. His demeanor and temperament give him a presidential bearing.

I knew that he was running an extraordinary campaign in extraordinary times. Possessed of a preternatural self-confidence, he stuck to his strategy no matter the polls. He brooked no dissension among his staff. He exploited the technology favored by the young to raise more money than any candidate in the history of American presidential campaigns.

And he had the good fortune to run at a time when other fortunes were not faring well. American voters were disgusted by the Bush presidency, sick of war and anxious about their economic well-being. A financial calamity unprecedented in modern times lifted Obama just as it swamped his rival, John McCain.

Still, I didn’t really believe Obama could overcome the vestiges of racial suspicion and hostility to win the presidency. That he did suggests that the racial chasm has narrowed much more than I knew.

An Obama presidency does not herald the end of racism in America. Obama isn’t “post-racial.” He isn’t the messiah whose coming ends bigotry and inequality for all time. He’ll just be the president.

Still, that accomplishment alone suggests tectonic plates have shifted. The contours of America’s cultural landscape look a lot different today than they did before. And we are a different people —- a people for whom change and hope are neither campaign slogans nor empty words.

> Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor.

cynthia@ajc.com