A week ago, more than 1,000 people showed up in Harlem to hear a discussion that had previously been kept within the rambunctious, fractious family that is black America.

The debate was about whether the election of Barack Obama was indeed a good thing for us.

On one side were people like Charles Barron, a New York City councilman and former Black Panther who, like Obama, cut his political teeth in the world of community organizing. He said that Obama’s candidacy had already been paying off; that he saw it bring momentum to blacks in politics and helped propel many of them into office.

On the other side were people like Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report and a fervent Obama critic. He skewered Obama for choosing former Clintonites for his Cabinet, and for his support of the Wall Street bailout that he says is bound to do more for billionaires more than black folks.

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Ford also took black people on for their refusal to question Obama, saying, among other things, that we are going to be in deep trouble once we start imagining an Obama that doesn’t exist.

Here’s what I say.

I say Ford is dead on when it comes to that last point. We will be in trouble if we treat Obama like our Holy Savior and not our president.

We’ll indeed be in deep doo-doo if we actually believe that the only effort we needed to make toward defining our collective destinies was to cast a vote for Obama.

I don’t believe black people are that naive.

To many, the Harlem debate may have been too little too late. For months, Ford and others, including a colleague of mine, rightfully questioned whether black people were giving Obama too much of a pass during the campaign season.

We seemed to be the only group, they argued, that believed we had no right to demand anything of Obama because forcing him to acknowledge us would scare off white voters; that we should accept a sly wink while other groups got an enthusiastic nod.

Me, I didn’t believe it was a matter of rights as much as it was a matter of choice.

Unfortunately in America, since a reluctant Abraham Lincoln tried to maintain favor with slaveholders in border states by signing an Emancipation Proclamation that freed all slaves except theirs, we’ve been forced to accept progress in little doses; to always dwell in a place between the lesser of the two.

On top of that, our history of always having to battle those who would steal back that progress – people like John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin – often forces us to think and politic defensively.

It shouldn’t be that way. But it is.

Yet I also believe that Barron is right. I believe that the election of Obama is a good thing in that it has the potential to reposition us politically.

That potential exists because Obama won largely because of black people who believed in him enough to stand in line for hours – and smash all-time turnout records – to vote for him.

So even if we held back on our criticism before Election Day, even if we decided that stealth was the best strategy for getting him into office, there’s no need for us to feel that way now.

That’s because we now know our strength. And just as we used .....

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