There are a number of ways to explain the feeling that what will be accomplished by the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African American President of the United States is enormous. One way is to think of his ascension to the Presidency teleological. That means that it is the end of a story, a completion, that has been worked out from the materials and the problem set by the story in a way that satisfies a sense of justice or whatever else one prefers to call a sense that the pieces have been assembled appropriately with due respect and reference to what came before. Hamlet is satisfying because it ends as it began, with Hamlet overcome by events he can analyze but not penetrate, but it is a tragedy rather than a teleology because there is no epiphany, to borrow the generic term, no grand accomplishment of what was intended, as happens when the crucified Jesus is recognized as just the sort of Messiah there was supposed to be, even though that was not recognized until after He had arisen from His tomb.

That the original settlements on the North Atlantic coast of America would bind together and create a great Republic is also teleological. We are awed by this realization, even if some would dismiss it as simply the exercise of the ideology of “Manifest Destiny”. Well, that is what teleology is about: a destiny that is perhaps at first barely understood and then becomes manifest and obvious and then accomplished. A teleology seeps into the imagination and practice of everyday life. New Mexico is part and parcel of the United States, not to be returned, even if the Philippines were, and even if the manifest destiny, the teleology, of Puerto Rico is still not clear.

I was having coffee at one of my haunts and two black women were sitting at a nearby table. One of them said that a friend was going to have to cross the country to accompany her father to the Inauguration because a special reception or something was going to be held for the surviving Tuskegee Airmen. She thought it was going to be a big hassle and she hoped that the invitation committee knew that these people were quite old and would require special accommodations. Her friend said she thought the inauguration people knew that. And so the elevation of Barack Obama had worked its way into the world of practical arrangements and the significance of the Tuskegee Airmen had been intensified in their own lifetimes by the elevation of someone who is spiritually their own into the very highest office when, in their time, their elevation to USAAF pilots was a controversial and much decried effort as well as a promise of things to come that not everyone was able to recognize, though Eleanor Roosevelt did. Most people thought of the Tuskegee Airmen, to the extent they thought about them at all, as a patronizing attempt to raise to the status of full fledged airmen recruits from a people not yet “ready” for full inclusion in civil and military society, some of those decriers certain that African Americans never would be ready or ought to be so honored.

At least for African Americans, there has been a kind of teleology in the sense that African Americans can now fully claim the United States as their homeland when that was not a very promising outcome given the conditions under which they came here. In this one not so small sphere the end point has been reached in that the story has come to its completion with a happy ending. There is a sense of the fitness of it all. That does not mean that all American ethnic stories end this way or need to, or that human history is the record of many such stories, or that there is a teleology that guides all of history and so makes history sacred rather than profane, but this story will do for a while to heighten our sense that things can work out in a truly satisfying way.

We are not used to thinking of history in our times resulting in happy endings. That is certainly not the story of American ethnic groups who gain their full recognition only after they have been largely assimilated and so there is no longer a sense of a culture vindicated. The Germans got Dwight Eisenhower elected only after the German immigrants for obvious reasons forgot that they had been Germans. The Irish are an exception, along with African Americans, in that their first President was elected while Irish American culture was still insular.

The Jews provide an interesting contrast. They are still a lively cultural group however much their ranks are thinned around the edges by apostasy and intermarriage. They have had no first President, but even if they did, it would not be a teleological event because the hatred of Jews persists around the world, indeed, is a hallmark of a nation or a civilization entering or encountering the Western world or putting its pre-industrial roots behind it. It is the fate of the Jews that their story does not end but goes on forever, which is perhaps a characteristic of their people that was understood back in the times when Genesis was redacted. The nomadic patriarchs always found a reason or created a reason why they would have to continue to wander. The independence of Israel as a kingdom was short and out of keeping with the spirit of the Bible-- or at least that is my interpretation, which treats the period of priests and kings as an anomaly, the world a wilderness in which Jewish prophets and Jewish patriarchs continue to wander.

So what is remarkable is that the circumstances of African-American history have made it possible for there to be a teleological moment: an end state which was wished for by most African Americans who prayed for it, marched for it, fought for it, even as some of them favored another course, such as a return to Africa or a separate country in North America. And not only was the end state possible; it was accomplished. That is something for preachers to crow about, God's vision of equality made real in the world, a worthier sermon than any preached by Rev. Wright.

I am giving a party to celebrate Obama’s inauguration as a triumph over prejudice and discrimination, which were the terms forged by social scientists in the Forties and Fifties and Sixties to describe the situation of Black people and other minority groups. The twin concepts of prejudice and discrimination, the first referring to a feeling, the second referring to an action based on a categorization of a person into a group, came to be supplanted by ideas concerning conflict and racial exploitation and then by ideas of diversity and ethnic pride. What has happened is that the original terminology, which envisioned the state of Black people as difficult but not impossible to remedy has been vindicated and those other and what I believe to be the lesser conceptualizations have atrophied. So that too is a kind of teleology: that concepts and not just people become realized, become manifestly true.

As it happens, there will only be white people at my party. That is not a bad thing, a sign of insufficient integration, but rather a report of the fact that white people, of themselves and for themselves, can take joy in this occasion. Outsiders can notice the grandeur of a teleological event in their own time, even if it is not their own. As my daughter put it, African-Americans people can want to be with their own to celebrate, which means, to me, that they do not need to be with white people to announce the celebration, and so have emerged intact as a people. That is further confirmation that we have all witnessed and are participating in a grand event.