The day before Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States of America, I asked a class of post-graduate students if they thought an Obama win (were it to happen) would amount to a historically significant event, a landmark of sorts, a watershed. Ever since the great materialist historians of France and Britain discredited a style of history-writing that reduced history to a chronicle of kings and queens and governments, students of history have been careful not to freight individuals with more historical significance than they can bear.

Two students in a class of six argued that Obama’s election would make no material difference to race relations in America, nor to America’s relations with the world. Both of them had specific reasons for their view: the boy, a Maoist, said that America’s military-industrial complex was too entrenched for any individual to affect, and the girl (of no explicit political affiliation) was content to argue that Obama’s election would be, at best, a kind of tokenism practised by a society keen to buy cheap absolution for its racist past and present.

Since I had been following Obama’s career obsessively for more than four years, ever since I read a magazine profile of him written around the time he was running for the US Senate, I felt both disappointed and chastened by their unillusioned take on an Obama presidency. Disappointed because in a corny way I expected ‘young people’ to be excited by the prospect of a relatively young black man becoming the president of the most powerful country in the world, and chastened because their answers made my excitement feel like middle-aged hyperventilation.

Even middle-age wasn’t an excuse because there were many grown-up people whose views on Obama’s campaign were similarly clear-eyed. In an interview with the New Statesman, the writer, Arundhati Roy, refused to endorse Obama. For the American electorate, the choice between Obama and McCain was no better than the humiliating choice Indians faced between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, she said. If Obama was elected, he would, metaphorically, turn into a white man because “He’ll have to prove that he is whiter than the white man.”

If Arundhati Roy’s argument about the irrelevance of Obama’s colouring came from the Left, Christopher Hitchens disdained Obama’s blackness from the Right. A Trotskyist who became a neo-conservative a few years ago, Hitchens declared with fine rhetorical flourish in the Wall Street Journal that “I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not be because he — like me and like all of us — carries African genes.” For Hitchens the idea that Obama’s mixed race identity or his colour made his candidacy historic was ignorant and sentimental because science had taught us otherwise: “The enormous advances in genome studies have effectively discredited the whole idea of ‘race’ as a means of categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it with color.”

Having scientifically demonstrated (at least to his own satisfaction) that since everyone was African, no one was black, Hitchens went on, in another article, to dismiss the excitement about the significance of Obama’s candidacy as a feeble-minded capitulation to identity politics: “The more that people claim Obama’s mere identity to be a ‘breakthrough,’ the more they demonstrate that they have failed to emancipate themselves from the original categories of identity that acted as a fetter upon clear thought.”

So why was I thrilled by Obama’s victory? And what reason was there to believe that a hundred years from now, his election as president would merit a page or even a footnote in a history of the 21st century? It’s salutary to be reminded of the historical cruelties of the American State, and the suffering it has inflicted on people within its borders and beyond them. In the headlined hysteria of the moment, it’s useful to be reminded that Obama’s ascension won’t, in the foreseeable future, reduce the population of African-Americans in jail, extend their life-expectancy or magic blacks out of inner-city ghettoes into prosperous suburbs. And in Obama’s declared foreign-policy intentions — his determination to wage an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, his keenness to bomb Pakistan in pursuit of bin Laden — there is enough to depress the most enthusiastic supporter.

And yet, shouldn’t a historically informed scepticism about Obama, founded in an understanding of the past nature of the American State, be nuanced and complicated by another history, one that feeds directly into this election? To acknowledge the history of American empire and the heartbreak it has visited on this world is proper. But surely we should simultaneously recall the struggle against slavery and segregation, recognize that span of history, which now includes Obama in its arc, remember Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin and Rosa Parks, and try to imagine what the election of a black man to the American presidency would have meant to them? Because unless we make that effort, our scepticism of individuals and the politics of identity remains depthless, unempathetic, ahistorical.

Ironically it was a conservative American writer, Michael Gerson, a supporter of McCain, who summed up the historical symbolism of Obama’s victory: “An African American will take the oath of office blocks from where slaves were once housed in pens and sold for profit. He will sleep in a house built in part by slave labor, near the room where Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation with firm hand. He will host dinners where Teddy Roosevelt in 1901 entertained the first African American to be a formal dinner guest in the White House; command a military that was not officially integrated until 1948. Every event, every act, will complete a cycle of history.”

A few days before the election, the great American novelist, Toni Morrison was asked roughly the same question I asked my students. Morrison, whose wrenchingly beautiful novel about slavery, Beloved, is arguably the best American novel written in the past half century, had this to say. “This election is critical, vital to more than just people in the United States. It’s going to make a big, big difference which way it goes… I think the promise with Senator Obama is that we return to an idea known as ‘the common good’…” Toni Morrison is a black woman, who, despite Christopher Hitchens’s dazzling deconstruction of race and colour, has no doubt at all about her blackness, the history of that blackness and the significance of Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency of the United States of America to that history. Asked what she was going to do on election night, this grand old woman of American letters who has won every distinction that a writer can hope for, said: “I have three choices: I can go to some friends; I was invited to go on a TV show; but I think under the bed may yet prove the safest place to be.”

She can come out from under the bed now, and I can tell my students tomorrow that I had asked them the wrong question, that there are times when, like a good reader, it’s good to briefly suspend disbelief, to resist the pleasure of knowingness, to give yourself up to the promise of the present. The election of Barack Hussein Obama is one of those times. For a day (or a week), history can take care of itself.