Four Questions About Barack Obama – The MultiView

Today’s multiview stems from a questions I found myself asking just about everyone I ran into shortly after Barack Obama won the presidential election. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to ask some people who took the time to either sit down and answer into a recorder or email their answers back to us. Below are answers from people spanning generations, income levels, race, sex, political affiliations and so on. Interviews were reproduced as faithfully to the original as possible.

We also welcome you to answer the following questions in our Comments section below. Enjoy.

Question 1: Where were you and what were you doing when Barack Obama won the necessary votes and gave his acceptance speech?

“I was at Jason Gibner’s house with his lovely pregnant wife Erin and my lovely lady Mariah and I was fighting back tears as I kind of sat and took in what this meant. And then later on I was very jealous of all the stories that I heard from people of downtown Ann Arbor exploding in a huge flurry of activity and people charging the Diag and high-fiving each other and beeping at and everything like that. I thought that was great, but I was very happy to celebrate this time with very amazing friends and life-long buds.” – Jeremy Wheeler, DJ/comic artist/film critic, Ann Arbor, MI

“I was at Babs’, oddly enough [where this interview took place]. Actually, I was flyering for a gig and I was out in the streets and I hit, like, seven to ten bars that night and just catchin’ the vibe that night. Honestly, it didn’t really hit me until I watched his acceptance speech and honestly, a little shit welled up in me, like I’m not gonna [cry], but — You know what it was? It was, I was proud to be an American all over again. I am so United States. I love everything this country was built on. I hate some of the shit this government does, but I love the fact that I’m able to hate it. Do you know what I mean? And I was really just choked up that I was happy to be American all over again. Like, I didn’t want to move out of the country anymore. I wanted to stay here and do something and I was so happy. To me it was a monumental thing and it didn’t really hit me until I went home and watched the re-run of the acceptance speech and I was like — I was with my buddy and both of us were kind of choked up. It was two grown-ass men watching television and not talkin’, like, ‘Dude, don’t look at me.’ [laughs]” – Brian “Just B” Alverez, DJ, Ann Arbor, MI

“I was actually in my office finishing up work that I had to do for the next day unfortunately. But, I was sort of keeping track of what was going on my computer as it was going on. Yeah, CNN.com and I was just hitting refresh while I was doing my work. I was writing a research proposal for one of my courses.” – Shawn Henry, U of M Grad Student, Mathematics, Ann Arbor, MI

“I was at home in my living room and I was sitting there bewildered, dumbfounded, excited and amazed. It took me a whole 24 hours to really realize that he actually had won. Not only won, but he won. He didn’t just win by a couple of votes, he like, really won by a landslide considering that he’s a black president — and I’m black — I didn’t think that America was really ready to have a black president, to be perfectly honest. I voted for him, of course, not because he was black but just because he was better than McCain. I liked McCain. I just thought he’s a little bit too straight-laced, too conservative for what the country needed as a whole at this particular moment. I think maybe if he would’ve ran in the 80s or early 90s, he would’ve been a prime candidate and idealistic president for that era. But I don’t think with how everybody is just so liberal and more open-minded as the years go on, you know, in the new millennium. I don’t think that — I never thought that [McCain] would win and definitely, Palin didn’t help. ” – Laditra Jackson – Chef, The Melting Pot, Ann Arbor, MI

“I was at home and I was just watching it on TV and I was proud! I was proud of him, not just for being the president but just for conducting himself in the manner that he did. You very rarely see, like, a lot of black young males — I consider him as young. He’s not my age, but he’s young, you know. I just took it as a movement. It let a lot of people know of the different cultures that, you know, African-Americans — it’s not just one stereotype, so I liked that because I think that because he’s president, that other people will look at other black males as positive figures, not just as drug dealers or bangers or somebody who’s trying to rob you or anything. It’s a lot of people that I know that’s black, but they’re so close to white that you wouldn’t really know they were black unless you seen them. Like, if you talk to them over the phone, you’d be like, ‘Oh, wow.’ cuz they’re into more white stuff than, you know, black stuff. It’s definitely a positive thing because it opens up doors for, you know, it might be other young kids aspiring to be a president. When I was younger, I was like, I looked at the ruler of all the presidents and I was like, ‘Ain’t anybody in my family every been president. I don’t see anybody black on here. There’s about 24 presidents on the ruler. I just didn’t even think about growing up as a president was even possible. It is enlightening. It is motivation that you can be what you want to be if you strive for it.  ” – Ralph Cheatham, The Melting Pot, Ann Arbor, MI

“I was at my house in Ferndale. We hosted an election party and had CNN on the TV in the living room and NBC on the TV in the dining room. I first saw it on the NBC and was like “NBC’s Calling it…” walked into the living room and CNN called it and we erupted into applause and then sort of stood around with this moment of awe and wonder. A couple of moments later I went out on the front porch and could hear people cheering on 9 Mile Road in downtown Ferndale so we started cheering on our porch too. We watched his speech from my living room. Wanted so bad to drive around town like the red wings had won, but didn’t.” – Scott Myers, Actor/Improviser, Ferndale, MI

“Lying in bed, watching the vote count. (I was not feeling well). Afterward I could hear screams of joy up and down the NYC blocks.” – Jessie Russell, New York, NY

“Salida, CO. Sleeping.” – Forest Casey, Photojournalist, Los Angeles, CA

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