When I was little, all the things we learned about U.S. History seemed so far away. The last thing I thought George Washington was was an actual man, even though they told us he used to ride his horse around the Connecticut streets I grew up riding my bike on.

As I got older, it started hitting me like one-ton brick packages that this stuff, compared to, say, all of recorded history, wasn't so long ago, and involved real people just like me. The mass slaughter of Native Americans, the Civil War battles fought on our soil, covered by the New York Times as current events, women's suffrage, and, in my parents' lifetime, black people being thought of as less than human, forced to use their own bathrooms and water fountains, and not allowed to vote.

Today, we elected a black man president. Think about all those protest songs you know. All those Public Enemy albums. All those radicals who raised a fist in the face of the old, white, guard. Didn't it almost seem like a pipe dream? Like, "Yeah, we want black and white to come together, to be equal, of course--but the crusty white guys in charge will never actually let it happen...." Well, now a young, black, guy is in charge. It's almost like we skipped some steps and shot right for the mountaintop.

This is one of the most important days in this country's history. It may take a while for policies to change, for us to get out of Iraq, for health care to become universal, for the economy to be fixed... but race relations just got an immediate boost, and that might just be the most important thing.

Barack Obama, President of the United States. I'm proud to be here to see it.