Obama's People.(; LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)

Readers responding to our Jan. 26 cover story on "Obama's America" were still flush with elation. One marveled that though he grew up in "bigoted" Texas, he found himself voting for Obama without a thought to race. An adopted Korean said she did not vote for Obama, yet her "heart soared as he was sworn in."

The Citizens of a New America

I have spent more than 30 years studying the experience of racial minorities in the United States. I went from the barrios of Compton, California, to Princeton and Columbia, and I am now a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas. Crossing such different spaces has engaged my curiosity and reflexivity. In "Who We Are Now" (Jan. 26), people of color come across as a combination of Hurricane Katrina and Ellis Island--we are historically framed as a demographic hurricane and we are periodically framed as part of the "new America." Diversity is new? In my research, I can tell you that we in the United States have always been this way. Racial diversity is part of our story. After being in Washington for the inauguration and reading the local papers, I thought, there is something complex and long about our story that is often missed by well-meaning folk in the cosmopolitan bubbles of New York and Washington. I am your neighbor. My uncle helped build some of the roads you drive on. My great-grandfather wrote poetry during the late 1800s after a long day of work in the Salinas, California area. Barack Obama just provided a window through which to see ourselves again.

Juan F. Carrillo

Austin, Texas

From the perspective of a 66-year-old white man, what happened on Inauguration Day, Tuesday, Jan. 20, is truly astounding. I grew up in the highly segregated and bigoted central Texas of the 1940s, '50s and '60s. As a matter of course, we used all of the hateful racial epithets or, when we were being nice, substituted "Negroes" or "colored people" for them. We told mean racial jokes and committed horrible acts toward black people. I could not imagine using a toilet or drinking from a fountain after a black person because we thought they carried diseases. My hometown was totally segregated, and no black person would dare come to your front door, go to a white restaurant or fail to step off the sidewalk to let you pass. We did not hate blacks; we just did not think of them as real people with real feelings. On Nov. 4, without giving it a thought, I voted for a black man for president. Race--for or against--had nothing to do with my vote. It was not an issue, and only after the election did the significance become clear to me. We have overcome fear and hatred, and I am looking toward the future with optimism.

John Edens