I am off to Europe today, leaving the excitement of the elections with ambivalence.  On the one hand, I won’t be completely up to date and in touch with the latest developments and won’t be able to work for the re-election of the President. On the other hand, to be honest, I haven’t been working on the campaign this year, apart from occasional small contributions and apart from my clearly pro-Obama commentaries. I also must admit that being away, I hope, cuts down on my anxieties about the election results. This election is driving me crazy.

I have been trying to figure out why I am so tied up in knots about it, why it seems to me that the election is so important and why I am so invested in the results. After all, there is a chance that moderate Mitt, and not severely conservative Romney, is the alternative.

Moderate Mitt, perhaps, wouldn’t be so bad. Perhaps, he is honestly revealing himself as he has been rushing to the center in recent days, with the identical foreign policy to Obama’s, guaranteeing that the rich will pay their fair share and promising to work with Democrats in forging a bi-partisan approach to economic growth and fiscal responsibility. Proud of his great accomplishment in effectively insuring universal health insurance to Massachusetts residents, perhaps, I shouldn’t even worry about his pledge to repeal Obamacare on day one.

Then again perhaps not: there is no way of knowing what Romney will do, who he really is, and that scares me. And even scarier, are the people who support him and will make demands upon him. From the crazies who denounce the President as a post-colonial subversive, bent on destroying America, to The Tea Party activists, to the neo-conservative geo-political thinkers, to supply side economists, who imagine that austerity is the path to growth (as in Great Britain?), to those who want a small non-intrusive government on all issues except those concerning sexual orientation and women’s bodies, to all those who just want to “take America back.” I am far from sure that moderate Mitt could resist their pressures, while I am quite sure that severely conservative Governor Romney wouldn’t, and would be, in fact, at the front of the barricades.

On every policy issue, in comparison to the Republicans, I support the President.  Yet, that isn’t the reason for my passion or my anxiety. Rather, I think, it has to do with feeling at home, feeling comfortable in my country. Something I am thinking about as I get ready to leave for a while.

Obama’s election opened our country up. It was something I was privileged to observe and celebrate with my friends at the Theodore Young Community Center, a rich, diverse community, primarily African American. I fear that Romney and especially the forces around him seek to close my country down. I share these fears with many of my friends. Especially with Beverly McCoy, the receptionist at the center, her passion for Obama is unmatched. She recognizes a competitor in my wife Naomi, and the three of us have become very close friends, along with other friends at Theodore Young. Beverly is sure that the passionate opposition and hatred of the President is ultimately because of race. I can’t disagree. I hope my leftist friends, those quick to be critical of Obama, remember this on election day, and also when they get carried away declaring that there is no difference between Romney and Obama.

I am off to see these friends now. I am off for a swim before my taxi to the airport and flight to Paris to visit family. Then on to Rome, Warsaw and Gdansk to give lectures and take part in discussions about the politics of small things and media, and the elections and my most recent book, Reinventing Political Culture, which has just been translated into Polish. It should be an interesting trip.

Yesterday, Beverly and I agreed that we would meet after the elections and celebrate our friendship no matter what. She wants to tell the world that our friendship is thanks to Obama, but it will live whether “our guy” wins or not. But I do hope that when I come home I will feel comfortable. To that end, Naomi and I cast our absentee ballots two weeks ago.

Remember Preston Brown? He is the senior lifeguard at the Theodore Young Community Center, where I go for my daily swim. For a long time, Preston and I have been joking around about current events, joking with a serious punch. I play the role of the privileged white liberal, he, the skeptical black man. We first developed our parts in a year-long confrontation over the Obama candidacy. The skeptical Preston laughed at my conviction that Obama would be the Democratic nominee, and he thought it was absolutely hysterical that I thought that Americans would likely elect either a black man or a white woman to be President. As I have reported here, we made a couple of bets, which became the source of general community interest, and which Preston, to the surprise of many, paid up. We had a nice lunch at Applebee’s. It ironically, but presciently, ended with a small racist gesture coming from our waiter. We celebrated together, and we sadly noted that while things had changed, the change had its limits.

As a participant observer of Solidarność in Poland, the great social movement that significantly contributed to the end of Communism around the old Soviet bloc, I appreciate limited revolutions. Solidarność called for a self-limiting revolution. Perhaps this is even the time that I should approve of Lenin: “two steps forward, one step back.” Yet, I must admit, I have been disappointed with the stubborn and sometimes very ugly persistence of open racism after the momentous election of President Obama. While I think there is more to the Tea Party than racism, the calls to “take our country back” and the refusal of many to recognize Obama’s legitimacy have been extremely unsettling. Preston’s skeptical view was wrong about the majority of Americans, but he was right about a significant minority. And his concerns have a lot to do with the recent doings in Sanford, Florida.

Yesterday, Preston and I had a brief discussion about Trayvon Martin, which revealed to me, once again, how it is that race is a very real and persistent fact of American life, and why it is that we have so many problems with it.

When I entered the pool area, Preston called out to me, “they got your guy in Florida,” kidding that Zimmerman somehow was my guy. He was trying to get me to engage in conversation, distracting me from my primary task at hand (getting in an hour’s swim, a bit less than two miles) providing for himself some distraction from looking at the pool for hours. I had a little extra time, so I went over since we hadn’t yet talked about the Trayvon Martin controversy.

I told him how terrible I thought the killing was, how horrible it is that we live in a country where such a thing is not only possible, but likely. I confessed to him how I particularly felt badly for Trayvon’s parents, and the parents of young black men more generally, revealing my age and despair, and my recognition that this is something that I did not have to go through as a parent.

He responded by pointing out to me that most young black men who are killed are killed by other young black men. And he continued, the problem is something that we can’t ignore and must address.

I then agreed but pointed out that recognizing that problem doesn’t diminish the troubling racism that was probably at the root of Zimmerman’s identification of Martin as a threat and Zimmerman killing Martin, and the police acceptance of Zimmerman’s account. He agreed.

On that note, I reminded Preston that I wanted to swim for an hour and that the lap session ended in exactly sixty minutes. I suggested that he could allow me to swim into his break, but he would have nothing to do with that.

Our exchange was short and to the point. It was based on mutual good will and respect, which comes from our shared experience. I think it is important to note that if he made my argument and I made his, the meaning of the exchange would have been exactly the opposite of what it was. Instead of being two people talking against racism, it would have been a conversation of two people constituting racism’s persistence. There is a complex relationship between text and context in the exchange, and our mutual understanding is built upon an awareness of this, and our willingness to say things that are hard to say, especially Preston’s recognition of the problem of violent young black men. It is a question of the interaction between who can say what, what they must say and how the must say it, as Irit Dekel explored in her post about Guenter Grass’s controversial poem “What Must Be Said,” and as is implied in my reflections on Poles and Jews.

This is how I interpret the importance of the national protests calling for justice in this case, including “The Million Hoodies March” just outside my New School office, which I observed first hand. That the mobilized included people from different walks of life, young and old, black and white, was crucial. Their co-presence publicly represented at least the beginning of the kind of conversations that Preston and I and many others are having.

These are the two sides of race and racism in America. There are the hateful racists to be sure, those who make racist comments about our President and fight to get their country back, but much more common and difficult is the racism that informs George Zimmerman and the Sanford police’s decision to take his unlikely story completely seriously to the point of not seeing probable cause. And then there are the people who try to work the complexities out, difficult as this is, with no silver bullet, including the election of an African American President.