Now that America has finally elected a black president there is a movement afoot to take away the significance of this moment.

I was riding along the turnpike the other day and I struck up a conversation with a token booth worker, who I've talked with for the last fifteen years driving this route.

"So we have a black president, huh?" I said to him as I handed him my ticket and money.

"Why do people keep saying that?" he said. "His mother is white! So he's not just black."

"Okay. But he's still black," I said.

"So Tiger Woods is black, too, I guess," he said, chuckling.

"Exactly. He sure is."

What's very curious to me is that before November 6, America was very clear about the blackness of Barack Obama. ...

Now that Barack Obama has won the battle for the presidency, what will it mean for race relations in this country? Will America have to put aside all of the unreasonable opinions and prejudices and out-and-out racist ideas and start to view itself as finally united? Will we begin to view each other individually --not as black people and white people, but as Americans?

I've seen a lot of comments on these pages from some very hateful and confused people who accuse blacks of being racist because there is a Black History Month or a Miss Black America pageant or even an AOL Black Voices.

Well, there was a need for Black History Month to let people know that contributions by blacks to this country extend beyond the spheres of slavery and civil rights. Yes, there were Frederick Douglass and Harriett Tubman, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., but the inventions and industries created by and built on the backs of African Americans have been mostly ignored. Inventing the traffic light, the filament that made the light bulb possible, the mailbox, and the original golf tee, plus discovering blood plasma and three hundred uses for the peanut -- all were accomplished by African Americans. That's why we have Black History Month, so that we'll, to borrow a phrase, "never forget."

But will having a President Barack Obama eliminate that need to remember? Will black contributions now find their way into the annals of mainstream America?

Two neo-Nazi skinheads were reportedly arrested in a plot uncovered by The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to assassinate Barack Obama and kill 88 black high school students in Tennessee.

I hope this is not a symptom of a greater ill.

I was asked recently by a very prominent attorney what did I think would happen after Obama won. I told him there would be a rise in overt racism in this country, perhaps something like we haven't seen since the 1950s.

While race has obviously become less of a factor in this country, which seems to be heading toward its first African-American president, there are still pockets and factions in this country that are still very much stuck in the past.

And while many of us are rightfully focusing on the economy or perhaps an assault by terrorists from another country, history tells me we have to check the terrorists within...