On September 25, 1957, President Eisenhower had to use the 101st Airborne division of the United States Army to force the State of Arkansas to admit nine black students to a public high school in Little Rock. In 2009, two little black girls play on the White House lawn as their father sits in the Oval Office, commander in chief of that same army. For this, I'm proud of my country. Proud of it for having the nerve and the longing and the faith to bring Obama to where he is. So much has been said about what this means for African Americans. But thankfully their feeling of redemption is a shared one. As James Baldwin taught us, black liberation was never only about black people. It was also about whites being liberated from the tyranny of their own white supremacy. I cried watching Jesse Jackson as he wept in Grant Park. Jackson, the man who stood on the balcony in Memphis beside King the day King was murdered. Obama's gift to me is that Jackson's tears can now be mine. We're crying about the same thing, without artifice or fear, as you cry at any overwhelming joy—with happiness but also allowing in, at long last, the ache of the time lost before joy arrived. Only in joy do we allow ourselves to feel rather than simply describe the darkness that preceded it. And so the political emotion of hope contains within it our grief over torture and lies and needless slaughter.

At noon on Election Day, in the windowless back room of a car dealership in East Toledo, my boyfriend and I chatted with a UAW worker named Sam and a shy, mixed-race queer kid. The two of them had just finished their first get-out-the-vote canvassing shift that morning. Sam ate his sloppy joe and talked about his Republican brother-in-law losing his job of 27 years at Champion Spark Plug. The queer kid had been texting his friends, and then he peered up, blushing, to admit he'd never done this before and that it felt good.

What he'd never done, what we were all doing that day, was knocking on the doors of working people—black, white, and Latino—in housing projects and poor neighborhoods, where for every modest, decently maintained house or apartment there were three or more badly disheveled or vacant. Snarling dogs kept for protection rather than companionship barked from behind many a closed blind. These people had been struggling long before George W. Bush came into office, and their circumstances are unlikely to change dramatically with the inauguration of a president constrained by two wars and a government in the fiscal ditch. Here, it seemed, hope could be a menace. A taunt. But in many homes, mostly those of black folks, there were black-and-white posters of Obama in profile, hand raised to his chin in contemplation, the words VOTE NOW emblazoned across the top, and along the side a quote of his reason for running, including the phrase, "because I believe there is such a thing as being too late."

Around the world, Americans are often ridiculed for their naiveté, for their ignorance of the grim power of history to cut idealism down off its pedestal. And indeed, mixed with ignorance and incompetence, our naiveté is deadly, as we have come to see in Iraq. But there is a reason that people from all over the world look at us differently now than they did on November 3. Because in our endless innocence we once again took the risk of believing.