The positive effect that Obama's election has and will continue to have on a generation of Black youth will change this country. He has been the focal point of the country and the world. A young, successful Black man rising to the highest position in the land. Just realize, for a moment, that Black, White and Latino children who are 5 or so, will grow up with nearly all of their memories coming in a time when a Black man was President.
Obama victory opens door to new black identityL. Douglas Wilder, the first black person to be elected governor of Virginia, shares Robinson's sense of American identity. "But I can tell you, when you say that, people take umbrage," Wilder said. "They believe that you are dissing them, putting blacks down. I don't have to tell you what I am, you can look at me and see that I'm not white. So what difference does it make?"
It took Obama's election, however, to make that idea real.
"It's immediately transformative," Wilder said. "It immediately changes the level of discussion. This thing is bigger than we thought it was. It's too big to get our arms around, and it grows exponentially each passing day. It sets us on a brand-new course."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/OBAMA_BLACK_FUTURE?SITE=CODER&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT Looking at Obama, these kids see themselves"How about you start with this?" says Rudy Balles, once a gang member now a youth outreach worker for PeaceJam. "Our next president is the child of a single parent. This is a child of an immigrant. How about just that he is multiracial and he had to ask himself, 'Who are you? Where do you want to be in life?' He had to struggle to define himself. That's all our kids' story.
"Absolutely, it means something, especially for kids in the hood. 'One of us did it,' they say. 'No matter how much they tried to put him down, he did it. It's real.' "
When Roberts' youngest black and Hispanic students, the 10- and 11-year- olds, told him before the election that a black man could not be president, he says, "It taught me a lesson. At that age, they already thought it was impossible. I don't know if it's racism. I don't know if it's self-hatred. But now, it's a whole different kind of inspiration. It wasn't just Obama. It was Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin. They see their parents full of hope, energized, encouraged. We're in a different world now from the one they have known in the short time they have been here."
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/nov/06/griego-looking-at-obama-these-kids-see/ The prize gets easier to see"People look at us like, 'What are they going to steal?'" said Bonner, 51, who is black. "When I walk around every day I feel like that, like we are looked at the wrong way no matter what we do."
The historic election of the nation's first black president filled many in the black community of Newtown with a renewed sense that the remaining and sometimes subtle forms of racism they experience regularly could be erased.
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20081106/ARTICLE/811060411/-1/NEWSSITEMAP 
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