Experiencing Joy and Sorrow as a Black Man

In 2008, I felt like an American for the first time because I saw a leader who looked like me. All my life I hoped my education and accomplishments would free me from the history of my skin color as inherently inferior and forever intimidating. It never did. But then Barack Hussein Obama became president of the United States, and I believed that I belonged here.

A shift was happening internally as I perceived things to be changing around me. Perhaps now, with a black president of the United States, I could be taken seriously, given the benefit of the doubt, and assumptions of fear and…