By Martha Southgate

On Wednesday April 29, Barack Obama’s 100th day as the 44th President of the United States, four black writers gathered at McNally Jackson Books, an independent bookstore in Manhattan, for a panel discussion titled “Black Writing in the Age of Obama.”

Frankly, though I coordinated the event, I wonder if it isn’t a bit early for this kind of pronouncing. The current pace of cultural discussion prizes speed above all else, but in fact, real change is a slow accretion, like raindrops on a rock. I believe that the literary culture will continue to change and become more capacious and multi-racial while Obama is in the White House (let’s hope it’s for the next eight years) but that change will be only partially influenced by his presence.

Someone said to me recently that when he got elected she thought that the rappers would immediately stop saying nigga and the publishers would immediately start publishing a wealth of books by African Americans. I was charmed by this notion…but I never thought that change would come around that fast.

Like Obama and Dr. King, I do believe the arc of the moral universe is long and it bends toward justice. I think we’ll see this prove true in terms of a widening of the cultural dialogue too-but not in 100 days.

The April 29 bookstore event was co-sponsored by Ringshout, a blog and booklist that works to promote dialogue about (and we hope sales of) literary fiction and nonfiction by African-American writers; and the literary magazine A Public Space. An audience of around 65 people gathered to listen to authors Emily Bernard, Stanley Crouch, James Hannaham and me, Martha Southgate­ (I served as moderator) discuss Obama’s election and what it might mean to the literary life.

All of us had essays reprinted in the recent anthology Best African-American Essays 2009. In planning the panel, I thought that there might be a discussion of how the Obamas as symbol or image might have invaded the psyche of these writers, or some thoughts on how they might reach other writers as symbol. But the discussion quickly became more wide-ranging than that. Emily began with a fascinating disquisition on Obama’s body as symbol-not as a sex object (although someone in the audience did joke that he serves that purpose as well), but rather as an object through which we, as Americans, can examine the prism of race.

Stanley, always unpredictable, held forth on the ways in which Obama has shifted the public perception of what it means to be black in the United States-in part because, as he put it, Obama is a “half-caste” but not only that, because he chose to adopt African-American culture. He easily, as Stanley put it, “could have gone another way” (read: white wife, corporate lawyer, that’s all she wrote). But he found something compelling and attractive in the strong, stable aspects of our culture and was drawn toward it. Stanley also made much of Obama’s extraordinary discipline (noting that someone as attractive as the president has had no doubt had ample opportunity to stray-opportunities that he has not acted on). That was also, he said, something to note and emulate about him.

James started out with a long, hilarious exegesis of the name “Barack Obama” He said that it had a “euphonious, catchy sound that is easy to get your mouth around,” and that it was “a gift to anyone who cares about the sound and rhythm of words.” After this engaging opening, he went on to discuss what both Obama’s election and the current state of the economy might mean to the writer’s life-both things, he felt, present both enormous challenges and enormous opportunities.

He was also the only panelist to touch on the state of the publishing industry-which is in crisis, like most non-digital media (Chris Jackson, an editor at Random House put it best when he said at a panel I shared with him, “Any industry that depends on people to pay for words is in trouble now.”).

James feels that the current recession will force a cultural flowering and fresh innovation-I hope he’s right. I do think it’s time that serious writers begin to build community and figure out how to work with and/or work around mainstream publishing. It’s a complex task, but one that can’t be avoided any longer. Complaining about how the industry is so overwhelmingly white and that that’s the problem is so 20th century. We know that and we can’t change it-let’s move on and figure out how to make it work for us. Like President Barack Obama has done.

Martha Southgate is the author of 3 novels, most recently Third Girl From The Left. She is working on a new novel to be published by Algonquin Books