Not so black & white

Nobody, of course, will have any problem recognizing Barack Obama when he returns to the island later this month. But this time, they can just look for his security detail, as it’s a pretty safe bet that if the president of the United States, who will be renting a secluded up-island retreat in Chilmark, is standing beside a public road, he won’t be standing alone.

If Obama’s historic election marks an evolution of race relations in this country, then so, too, albeit on a smaller scale, does that moment on East Chop Drive. Rice and her husband, who are both African-American, own a stately house on an elegant stretch of waterfront road in an area of town once frosty, if not closed, to African-American buyers. When Harvard Law School Professor Lani Guinier’s family purchased a nearby home in 1972, her white mother conducted the transaction; the seller didn’t meet her black father until the family moved in.

Today, the island, like society itself, is more open and more people of color have the means to move beyond the cottage colonies that formed the community’s first foothold here. Yet Oak Bluffs remains the heart of African-American life on Martha’s Vineyard. This is where filmmaker Spike Lee, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, former US Attorney Wayne Budd, and Obama friend and advisor Valerie Jarrett vacation. This is where the striving, as well as the already arrived, come to unwind in the comfort and company of the like-situated. This is where generations return year after year for reunions of family and old friends. People run into each other along Circuit Avenue or on the post office plaza or at the so-called “Inkwell’’ beach beside the road to Edgartown.

“Oak Bluffs,’’ says Guinier, “is people you’ve grown up with, people who’ve known you, if not all your life then most of your life. They know the good, the bad, and the ugly. What you’re asking me to speak to is the sheer pleasure and joy of being together with people who also have a set of experiences or appreciation for experiences that you’ve had, that aren’t precisely the same but have enough in common that they recognize themselves in your experience. Frankly, it can be a little lonely in Boston.’’