I'm watching the inauguration (with my Facebook friends), and I just want to pause a minute and say that this event seems to me to be the perfect inverse of . . . the OJ trial.

The OJ trial was, for me, a watershed in terms of my understanding of race in this country. Until that time, I had no idea what a terrific gulf separated black and white in the United States.

I'll never forget where I was when the verdict was delivered. I was in class at UM-D; one of my students was listening to the verdict on a radio held up to her ear, and she announced what she heard as she heard it. "Acquitted. Acquitted." We all looked around the room at each other in disbelief . . . and then I noticed that my two black students were no longer in the room.

My husband had a similar story: His black supervisor had elected to go out to the parking lot and sit in the car with a black colleague while the verdict was delivered, rather than being in the office with her co-workers. I'm sure there were many similar stories all over the country.

That moment seemed to me to illustrate that blacks and whites lived in a completely different world, although we live in the same country.

This moment, by contrast - as I look at the crowd on the Washington Mall - seems one of unity. I'm really hopeful that Obama can lead us past bipartisanship to a focus on solving the problems we all share. I'm really hopeful that his inauguration signals a change for the better in race relations in the U.S.

I'm absolutely sure that Obama will disappoint me in many ways, because nobody could live up to the hype he's generated. But just the fact of him - black, well-educated, privileged, articulate, and about to be President - seems to me to be a great step forward.