“That Obama’s loss in the general election may have more to do with his performance than his melanin will be treated as something to acknowledge parenthetically at best. And that will be a dismissal of the very lesson Dr. King tried to teach us. Two decades ago, when Jesse Jackson ran for president and Time magazine did a cover with his picture and the headline “The Jackson Factor’, it was just to sell copies: We all knew America wasn’t ready for a black President. Perhaps the reaction was partly due to certain things about Jackson himself, but who knew that not so long later, a black man would be within a hair’s breadth of the White House in part because of his race? Yet, if we truly understand that King’s lesson was that black people are whites’ equals and not eternal poster children, then we must confront the fact that race is not the only reason Obama could lose.

King’s next birthday celebration will be, as it happens, the day before Inauguration Day, and I dread the prospect of black America treating King Day as an opportunity to rue how McCain’s swearing in will show ‘far we have to go’ 40 years after King’s death, rather than celebrating that how close Obama came to the prize showed how magnificently far we have come.”