ON Tuesday morning, as emotions were reaching a fever pitch, I heard a newly-minted black pundit on cable news say without any irony: "If Obama is elected, this will be bigger than the civil rights movement." To which I thought: "Hold on, brother. You need to get a grip."

I think we all need to get a grip on what Barack Obama's presidency will mean, not only in terms of the future, but how exactly it fits into the long march which has led us finally to an ebony 44th US presidency.

Rest assured there will be much talk about how the election of Mr Obama ushers in a new post-racial America. I predict such silly talk will have all gone away by April, surely by May, when it becomes clear that the high levels of poverty, and the high number of African Americans in prison, and black-on-black violence are still there.

There are no easy fixes to problems of racial injustice, no magic wands, not even magic elections.

More important, Mr Obama was not elected to be the president of black America, and this difficult truth will take many months to sink into the heads of many black folk. In fact there may even be times when Mr Obama will have to embrace short-term solutions that hurt black folk acutely.

That will be okay in the long run, for it will be essential for Mr Obama to underscore that he is an American before he is an African American, an idea that will take a number of months - if not years - to sink into the heads of many white folks.

Before his election, Mr Obama was a man of great charisma and a great focus for projection, largely of hopes and dreams. That is the simplest explanation for the first $700 million campaign financed largely by the people. It was for the people and by the people. But now, while Mr Obama will have greater freedom to speak more freely, he will also have awesome responsibilities. We should remember the election of Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, a one-time seeming impossibility: his mayoralty was by most measures a great success - until it failed.

It also worries me that Mr Obama's election may be seen as independent from the ongoing struggle for justice that has been going on in this country since before the Civil War. The truth is that Mr Obama is not Superman. He is not even the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. What he is, is a self-proclaimed geek. This greatly cheers me. Never more have we needed a technocrat than at this time. Personally I want him to get his geek on; I want him to become a Black Vulcan of the early Star Trek vintage. I want him to be dispassionate and logical and smart.

For as dramatic as it is to witness the first black man elected to the highest office in the land, the way he executes that charge is even more important.

* Randall Kenan's most recent book is The Fire This Time published by Saqi Books.

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