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Barack Obama has been proclaimed king - sorry, President - of the U.S. With that proclamation, all black Americans took their giant and final step forward. But the rest of America, especially white America, simply took one more step forward.

Catholics and the Irish - sometimes called the 'niggers' of Europe - completed their American journey in 1961 when the Irish Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy made it into the White House's Oval Office. With Barack Obama in that office, many other discriminated against groups will remain. Native Americans, American women, American Jews, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans...

For black Americans though, this giant and final step raises them from their position as America's perennial underdogs and basement dwellers. With one of their own sitting, as President, in the Oval Office, all black Americans have finally completed the American journey that many of America's other immigrant groups have already finished. That the Irish, Germans, English, and others came willingly to America; whilst Africans were first captured, beaten, shackled, chained, and then dragged into America; will become a far less important and infinitely less relevant fact.

  With a black American in the Oval Office, it will be clear to all the world, but, far more importantly, to all white Americans, that nothing - except himself or herself - impedes the progress of any black American. Get a decent education. Be disciplined and focused. Work hard and make good choices. These are the mantras that white America espouses as the keys to progress and success - whether in life, business, or politics.

     These same mantras were put forward by Bill Cosby and Barack Obama when they addressed the twin issues of opportunity for, and discrimination against, blacks in America. Over the past two decades, other black Americans (Shelby Steele, Alvin Poussaint, Clarence Page,...) have also preached these mantras.

Obama, Cosby, Steele... all made the same general point. Following the Martin Luther King years, for American blacks, further progress would only come through education, personal discipline, and hard work. The prejudices of others would simply have to be borne while being overcome with better education, tighter discipline and harder work.

On May 17, 2004, speaking to the NAACP, Cosby put it bluntly: "Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other nigga as they're walking up and down the street. They think they're hip. They can't read; they can't write. They're laughing and giggling, and they're going nowhere."

President-elect Barack Obama is a non-golfing, hoop-shooting, intelligent, articulate, educated, disciplined black man who wears fitted conservative suits with his pants at waist level; isn't 'blinged' out; and who does not look or sound like a 'homie' from 'da hood'.  President-elect Barack Obama has walked even further down a path already trod by people like Andrew Young, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice...  None of these humans portrays an image other than that of intelligent and competent persons - who just happen to have dark skins.

At sunrise today - Wednesday, November 5, 2008 - just as in Bermuda on Wednesday, November 10, 1998, blacks in America - like blacks in Bermuda - woke up in a new situation.

Black Americans woke up in a new America where things like 'affirmative action' programmes, and other programmes specially targeted at helping 'African-Americans' will be called into question. Why? Because all black Americans are on exactly the same footing as most of the other immigrant groups that came into America.

Centuries late though it may be, black Americans have still completed the American Dream journey.  Having 'made it', then, like those other immigrant groups, black Americans will be seen as having achieved actual and final equality. White America will understand that, in America, there is no longer any institutional or un-moveable racial barrier to black progress. White America will re-examine the need for many - if not all - special action programmes that were, or that are, being touted as necessary to redress things for black Americans.

On Wednesday, November 10, 1998, black Bermudians woke up to a Bermuda where all forward progress was now - or certainly could be made to be - along a road that was cleared of the previously existing barrier of institutional racial discrimination.

With sunrise on Wednesday, November 5, 2008, that's the way it now is in the new U.S.

What do you think? How significant is Obama's triumph to Bermuda and rest of the world? E-mail editor Tony McWilliam: [email protected][[In-content Ad]]

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