What does it mean now to be black in America?

Like Barack Obama on Tuesday night, I had my victory speech ready to go. Mine would also focus on the future, warn of difficult days ahead and conclude on a positive note. Kumbaya!

My audience, however, would be much smaller: My son and daughter -- high-schoolers who are not able to vote for Obama this time but will be in 2012. Like Obama, they are biracial, born of a black father and a white mother, and they are from Illinois.

I wanted to tell them as much of the past as of the future: How the election results should finally wipe away the vestiges of slavery, oppression and discrimination from this land and from our psyches. How they may go forward free from the trepidation I've always felt as a black man. How they should have all the possibilities that immigrants from Denmark, Sweden and Germany -- their mother's people -- have long enjoyed.

I did plan to tell them that. But as the evening wore on, I was swept into deeper thoughts and feelings, almost numbed by the enormity of the moment.

I wondered what to say to my son, who is 16 and will be driving on his own in a few months. Should I retract the "driving while black" advice I gave him when he got his learner's permit last summer? Is it now OK for him to act like a garden-variety, brooding, dismissive teen when a white man with a uniform and a gun pulls him over?

Can I stop worrying that innocent kids in black ghettoes will have their lives extinguished by random gunfire? Will real love and support come into the lives of so many young girls whose yearnings for that too often result in making them unready mothers?

Above all, can I -- and should I -- admit that my son and my daughter were right so many times in recent years when they told me that my view of a divided America, separate and unequal, is out of step with the circles they run in, where their friends span the spectrum of human hues and faiths, where race and religion are barely a diversion?

It is the place where one of the school's most respected journalism professors once told our class that you can't be black and paranoid, because paranoia requires an unrealistic expectation of maltreatment, and there was nothing unrealistic about blacks expecting to be treated unfairly in America.

But those Howard kids -- black, smart and headed somewhere -- were overjoyed Tuesday night. Howard University has produced Thurgood Marshall, Vernon Jordan, Andrew Young, even P. Diddy -- and many others who led the civil-rights struggle. At one point, fully half of this nation's black doctors and lawyers had earned their degrees from Howard. But does Howard or any black school that claims a birthright from legalized, institutionalized segregation still have a right or a need to exist?

So, while there was much I wanted to tell my son and daughter Tuesday night, I could not get my mind and heart around what clearly was a seminal moment. The momentous day of decision in America has left us with perhaps more questions than answers. In the end, I could tell them only what I knew for sure:

"America is a better place than it was when I was your age, and you need to help make it better."