Barack Obama became president today in no small part because his amazing Democratic primary campaign convinced many liberals and leftists for the first time of a truth they'd found counterintuitive and uncongenial. It's a truth Orlando Patterson has been telling for a long time, in books like The Ordeal of Integration, against a lot incomprehension and resistance. It is that anti-racist protest tactics and policies that were necessary, even heroic, before the 1980s are seldom now the best ways to defeat racism and the inequalities and wounds it unquestionably has left behind.

That many of these inequalities are actually growing for African-Americans, as Patterson explains, makes this counterintuitive truth even more important to national reconstruction. We shouldn't return to the politics of racialized grievance and paroxysm, whether the "politics of turmoil" or "the politics of difference," that dominated public life for thirty years. We shouldn't uphold "self-esteem"-inducing remedies for blacks in the legally mandated or facilitated color-coding of adoptions, separate academies for black pride, college admissions, election districts, and more.

Too often, these remedies have reinforced what they claim to redress. As Patterson puts it, "An outdated identity politics, abetted by leaders of the grievance industry, has steered black Americans away from what every other previously disadvantaged minority and class has concluded....Namely, that the path to full equality ultimately entails private incorporation into mainstream American society, especially through racial integration, exogamy, and the forging of both weak and strong network ties with the majority."

That's especially true now that the majority itself is in trouble. The prize we should keep our eyes is a basic reconfiguration of a political economy that is foreclosing opportunity for whites as well as blacks. It doesn't invest in Americans' education and security; it invests in their market-driven bedazzlement, degradation, and incompetence: Employers pretend to pay their stressed-out, benefit-less workers, who often pretend to work in return - when they can find work at all.

It will take civic unity to unravel this society-wide tangle of pathologies. Those of us who in the 1980s and '90s sailed our little crafts of commentary - as I did in The Closest of Strangers -- against strong political tides that racialized this basic challenge so divisively took heart from Patterson's truth-telling. But I never dreamed I'd see a black political leader like Obama, who personally embodies and publicly champions Patterson's "private incorporation into mainstream American society."

Obama knows better than any president before him (except perhaps Bill Clinton in his better moments) that the struggle for equality depends on organizing even segregated communities toward universal goals; on interpreting the Constitution against those who'd racialize jurisprudence in the name of exorcising its racism; and on winning elections across racial lines, not within them.

Obama's ability to adopt these vantage points and strategies owes a lot to his coming from a marriage of an African immigrant and a white woman that shaped him in the unusual ways he has described. But it owes just as much to his decision to marry into a paradigmatic African-American identity on Chicago's South Side instead of avoiding avoid it, as many biracial cosmopolitans do. Knowing that many whites would ascribe the more traditional "black" identity to him, anyway, Obama chose both to own it and to universalize it. How providential that is for the country and its aching, unfulfilled promises!

Patterson hopes, as we all do, that Obama can turn his experience and model into a message and a modus that can help reorient especially the thinking of young black men and those who have (and haven't) raised them. But Patterson also warns against thinking that deliverance is at hand just because Obama struck a responsive chord in millions of Americans. The paradox of black ascendancy in public life amid deepening black descent into debt, poverty, and cultural and personal dysfunction stops most of us cold.

My first thought is that presumptions of ubiquitous and unbending white racism don't get us very far. Racism has been mitigated somewhat by the modest comparative success of black immigrants from Africa or (like Patterson himself) from the Caribbean. Coming as they do from black-majority societies, most such immigrants grew up somewhat freer of racial stigma and somewhat more accustomed to seeing other blacks in positions of leadership in their own formative years. Racism has also been mitigated somewhat, if only subliminally, by the very presence of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in the highest counsels of power. It's not just symbolic. It has broadened horizons.

My second thought underscores Patterson's assertion (and Lyndon Johnson's in his famous Howard University address) that legislative, "civil-rights" victories don't equalize the chances of people who lack material assets and the intangible but even more essential social capital of skills, cultural understandings, and connections that make the work world accessible.

My third thought, though, is to note that the social and cultural networks that sustain rewarding work in America are unraveling rapidly for whites as well as non-whites under the impact of "free market" forces which we can reverse or channel only if we unite behind a shared agenda for reconstruction.

Unless that reconstruction is deep and confidence-inspiring, James Baldwin's query, "Why should I want to integrate into a burning house?" could regain the force it had when "white" walls of wealth and pride -- walls that, as Patterson notes, blacks themselves had to help construct, for little or no reward - looked strong and impressive enough to invite scaling and even to offer firm footholds for resistance and aspiration.

Now, though, as all that is solid melts into air even for middle class whites, the temptation to retreat for succor to warring ethno-cultural camps could increase, especially among blacks, who have already been losing marketable assets and options. That makes Obama's presidency all the more promising -- and fateful.

He can't keep to the high road of civic unity by himself. We have to help and push him to reconstitute a thicker American, civic-republican culture that draws from different communities of belief and belonging but weaves them into a fabric of justice and opportunity strong enough to keep whites as well as blacks from falling back into the past.

Here we should read Patterson's essay on racial inequality along with the one on "Opportunity" by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, also in Democracy Journal, and with the comments coming in this symposium from Theda Skocpol on that subject. The Warren essay's concrete agenda can mitigate racism's special burdens if it is enacted not to repay a racial debt but to sustain a broader reconstruction and, with it, the counterintuitive truth Obama made so convincing in his campaign, about the dangers of racialization and the importance of public comity.

We'll gain more of the latter this time if we can hold onto that truth than if we keep highlighting the system's racism in order to discredit it. This time, the whole system is already discredited enough.