Something happened in the country last week, and it wasn't just history.

As thrilling, as validating, and as exciting as it was to watch America lurch one step closer to fulfilling its promise of becoming that place of John Winthrop's imagination -- that "city upon a hill," he called it, where "we must be knit together in this work as one man" -- the real transformation had, in a sense, already happened. It had happened before the polls closed and the votes were tallied and the country agreed to be led by Barack Obama. It happened because people like you and I decided that we would no longer accept the idea that we were not real Americans.

If you're a person of color, or an urbanite, then you have known what I'm talking about for a very long time. If you're relatively new to this -- if you're a member of a profession, say, or you have immigration in your recent family background, or you are (gasp!) a Muslim -- then you can catch my drift. All of us have been told that we were not real Americans. For years we believed it.

Didn't we? All that alienation, all that apathy. All that talk about moving to Canada. All that defensive crouching when we traveled abroad, or met people who live in other countries. And -- worst of all -- all those feelings of inadequacy when confronted by those who proclaimed themselves to be the "real" Americans. As if an "American" was a type -- a white heterosexual male who lived in a small town, judging by the rhetoric -- instead of an idea.

For a whole variety of reasons, Barack Obama represents a greater leap away from this toxic belief about what a real American is than Hillary Rodham Clinton did; that's why those of us who always believed in him faced such mockery from within the Democratic Party. "Obamites," they sneered at us, a pejorative-sounding word that rhymes with Luddite and likewise conjures up visions of an obstinate, impractical people who just won't keep up with the times. They accused us of being cult-like, of falling for a Messiah, and of believing in empty rhetoric, instead of realizing that we were in a fight and just needed to lower our expectations for how much change the American voter was willing to accept. Hillary Clinton may not have been inspiring, went the subtext, but because only she could connect with real Americans, she was the only one who could win. Even when everything was going our way during the primary, the belief that we'd come to fetishize -- that of the white, small-town man as mythical American -- dominated our news stories, our talk shows and our worries.

And then, the switch: All of a sudden, we decided that maybe we were real Americans after all. I don't know how to explain the shift in thinking. All I know is that we decided we were real-enough Americans to call all those voters, attend all those rallies, donate all that money, wave those American flags. I started hearing stories about early voting last week -- stories of Americans standing in lines that stretched 10 blocks so that they could cast their ballots. In my lifetime, I have never, ever heard of Americans standing in those kinds of lines for voting. The only times I had ever seen Americans standing in lines like that was when some consumer good was at stake: a Madonna concert ticket, a limited-edition pair of Nikes, an iPhone. Not for our country.

Of course, our reclamation of who we are -- Americans -- has a lot to do with Obama himself. None of us could have believed his election was possible unless he first believed it himself. His election could not have become possible unless he believed he was American enough. The enormity of this psychological task for an American like Obama -- the son of an African in a country that once enslaved them; the son of a humble single mother in a country that draws its leadership from the wealthy and well-connected; an urbanite, a cosmopolitan -- is inconceivable. I could not have done it. I do not know anyone who could have done it. But now that he has, it seems like it was the only choice all along.

This is not to say that what will follow will be easy. America is an idea and an experiment; Americans will forever be engaged in the process of learning how to knit ourselves together. This task will only grow more daunting as the full nature of the social, economic and moral challenges that face us right now become clear. But now that those of us who have felt so differently for so long have realized that we, too, are Americans, the challenge grows easier. We realize not just who we are but what our stake in this country can be.