Starting around 10 p.m. on November 4, with the announcement of Obama’s victory, dozens of voices on the radio and in the op-ed pages seemed to feel obligated to summarize the historic racial meaning of the day. That 90s saw about Clinton being our first black president now seemed like the joke it always was. It finally, really happened, and the intonations of the media swelled accordingly.

Here is how Thomas Friedman began his column the next day:

“And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 10 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended . . .”

He went on: “A Civl War that in many ways was decided by the battle of Gettysburg, Pa., in 1863 concluded 145 years later via a ballot box in the very same state.”

This is what happens when media people feel obligated to rise to Big Meanings and Epochal Realities. In one sense, Friedman is right. If you measure racial equality as the actual elevation of a member of a racial group to the highest office of the land, then Obama’s victory is, indeed, the completion of the story. This applies the judgment by outcome, however, and it grants tremendous symbolic value to the White House. There are so many other ways to measure equality and liberty, though, and putting so much historic, epoch-making pressure on Obama’s triumph adds a symbolic burden to Obama’s presidency that no president should have to bear.

It also pushes the media voices themselves into delicate territory. Here is how Friedman explained the racial aspect of Obama’s vote a few sentences later:

“How did Obama pull it off? To be sure, it probably took a once-in-a-century economic crisis to get enough white people to vote for a black man.”

There it is. The only thing that could get enough whites to cross the color line in the voting booth was a financial crash of such force that it blinded them to their own white supremacy. On election night I heard David Gergen on CNN say much the same thing, affirming that while racism is strong among whites, enough of them were able to work through it and hit the button and put Obama over the top.

Why do such statements come off as so irritating? Not because of their truth or falsity, but because of the attitude of the speakers. Such condescension and self-assurance is out-of-place, especially on the complex topic of race. Who is David Gergen to scan the hearts of racial groups and explain their decisions? It takes a lot of reading and study to declare when and how racial progress “finishes its work” in America — I spent four years in archives working on a book on racial/sexual politics in turn-of-the-century Atlanta, and I still don’t quite understand it. What can we say of Friedman’s historiography?

The greatest danger of that arrogance is that their far-reaching vision can lead them into remarkable blindnesses. Friedman went on: “Let every child and every citizen and every new immigrant know that from this day forward: Everything really is possible in America.” Tell that to feminist supporters of Hillary Clinton, who saw the first real chance of a woman president dashed. Friedman stated that “the Civil War could never truly be said to be over until America’s white majority actually elected an African-American president.” Does the same logic apply to men and women?