Wow! What a night we witnessed on election night! My phone was ringing about every fifteen seconds with people wanting to share the celebration. Meanwhile, people were out in the streets of my neighborhood in West Oakland, or leaning out their windows, or lighting firecrackers, glorying in the news that we'd elected a black president.

There is no doubt that this is a historic moment. Obama stands in a long line of African American people engaged in the tradition of struggle for freedom, democracy, dignity, and equality. He joins them in asking, "What are we going to do about suffering and despair in America and around the world?" He joins them in demanding that we do something about it. He joins them in declaring that the time is now, that "we are the leaders we've been looking for." This is worth celebrating. Celebration is itself a revolutionary act with the potential to catalyze more life, more capacity for resistance.

At the same time, Obama's acceptance speech showed his understanding that he is not a messiah, that he cannot, on his own, turn the tide of suffering.

We all understand that the litmus test for the eradication of racism in this country is not the election of an African American president. The real measure of racial equity in this country is defined by the conditions of those living at the bottom of the system. We can't say that we've overcome racism because we have a black president. We'll have overcome racism when we no longer have public schools in crisis, when people aren't losing their homes at massive rates to foreclosure, when black people aren't losing their lives in disproportionate numbers in state-sponsored wars. Those are some of the real measures of racial equality.

One of the indicators that racism is still at work in our culture is the way in which some mainstream media reports have insinuated that black voters were somehow centrally responsible for the passage of California's Proposition 8 to ban gay marriage. This is a classic case of scapegoating, in which disproportionate attention is being paid to the black voters targeted by a massive homophobic outreach program, rather than to the mostly white institutions and funders behind that outreach program. Thankfully the New Yorker helped to clarify the situation in a December 1 article: "If exit polling is to be believed, seventy percent of California's African American voters did indeed vote yes on Prop. 8, as did upward of eighty percent of Republicans, conservatives, white evangelicals, and weekly churchgoers. But the initiative would have passed, barely, even if not a single African American had shown up at the polls."

Nevertheless, it was sobering to see how many African American voters cast ballots in favor of the measure. The "Yes on 8" campaign targeted African American communities very successfully in large part because of the effects of a racist society on sexuality and gender roles in those communities. Talking about sexuality at all in African American contexts, and especially African American church contexts, is deeply problematic because of the history of the denigration of black bodies in this country through enslavement, rape and accusations of rape, lynchings, and on and on. This discussion becomes even more loaded because of the ways that traditional gender roles have been inscribed in the empowerment of black families. The emasculation of black men in a racist society-their inability to really protect their families, to provide for their families-has resulted in strict gender roles that often play out as male dominance and female subordination. Anything that seems to interrogate these gender norms-the feminization of men, the masculinization of women-is threatening. In this way, African American homophobia is in part the effect of racism.

Homophobia among white working-class people is similarly an effect of class oppression, although it is important to note that oppression plays out differently among different groups. African American people have borne the full weight of the imperialist system in a way that people of the dominant culture have not. Because of that, it is revolutionary for African American people to fight homophobia and heterosexism in ways that it isn't for people in the dominant culture.

This is not to deny the suffering of white people who struggle to provide for their own families and may use homophobia and heterosexism as a way of defining themselves as strong and worthy in opposition to a demonized "other." Although oppression plays out differently for different groups, oppression tends to replicate itself as oppressed people oppress others. The only answer to the endless pecking order of isms is for all suffering people to enter into solidarity with each other to fight for the liberation of all and the flourishing of all life.

That means LGBTQ activists would get into solidarity with other suffering people to address not only the denial of the right of all to marry, but also the myriad other forms that domination takes. This means transcending self-interests to create authentic bonds of solidarity across lines of difference.

What does this look like? Here I think we can take some cues from what Obama did in his campaign. He used his deep exposure across many lines of difference to connect with the suffering of many different communities. Likewise, at First Congregational Church of Oakland, where I serve as senior pastor, we are engaging in intercultural work in an attempt to connect our own suffering with the suffering of all people everywhere. In this way we are struggling to recognize that the source of that suffering is an interconnected system or network of systems that create overarching structures of domination. When we address single issues that emerge from our own narrow self-interest, we are in essence pulling at the individual straps of the boot of domination, without recognizing the entirety of the boot that is holding us all down.

What are you to do if you are a white LGBTQ activist who genuinely wants to work against "the whole boot" in this way? If you want to build bridges to the African American community, start with your genuine care for the suffering of African American people. Let that compassion lead you into genuine relationships with African American LGBTQ activists who have been disenfranchised in the same ways as other members of the African American community. African American LGBTQs can traverse the full length of the bridge between LGBTQ concerns and African American concerns and can introduce you to other African Americans who are not gay. Work with this larger community of African Americans on the issues that directly affect their lives as a way to build real, authentic relationships. Through these relationships, everyone involved is transformed and made capable of entering into solidarity, even when their self-interest is not immediately served. This process leads to a broadened understanding of what liberation means-it is universal or it's nothing. This is the only way to create broad-based capacity for sustainable change.

This is what we are seeking to model by building our own alternative, intercultural community here at First Congregational Church of Oakland. We are allowing genuine bonds of commitment to transform all of us and build our capacity to work against all forms of domination and oppression. Then we are using what we learn here to do the same thing in the various communities in which we live and work.

So what's next on the Prop. 8 front?

We certainly continue fighting for the right of all to marry, but we must also continue to interrogate what marriage means in light of other forms of suffering. For me, the question of the freedom to marry has always raised another question: What do we want to marry for? Do we want freedom to marry so that we can preserve the nuclear family and move to a gated community? Live behind a picket fence that separates us from anyone different from us? Get a tax deduction so that we can consume more oil, further degrading the planet? Or are we going to use our partnerships to transgress and transform lifeless ways of being? Are we going to remake what it means to be married, to do family?

The denial of the right to marry does not mean we can't create queer families-families that transgress from a point of dislocation. That is what queerness is. Not only can we do it, but we can teach our children to do it. We can teach our communities to do it. And in this way we continue the struggle to "queer the world."

That struggle-the struggle to be alternative in conventional contexts-is exactly the struggle that we are engaged in at First Congregational Church of Oakland. Our success in doing that is not ultimately about which identity categories we occupy, but about our relationship to systems of domination and oppression. In the same way, electing a black man to the highest office in the land is not, in itself, a radical alternative act. Whether or not the election of Barack Obama is alternative is dependent in part on where he positions himself in relationship to imperial aims and ends, and also in part on what we do from here. If this lulls us to sleep, the empire will be served, but if this serves as an impetus for transformative change, starting in our own lives, we are at the beginning of something very new and life-giving.

Transformative change will come not from rushing "out there" to work, work, work, but from attending to the deadness in ourselves and in our left-leaning communities, deadness that comes from letting our own protective self-interest cut us off from caring relationships with others across perceived lines of difference.

What we need, in order to address that deadness, is the Spirit of Life, the same Spirit that moved across this country and made this historic election possible.

Rev. Lynice Pinkard is the senior pastor at First Congregational Church of Oakland in California. She is also a therapist whose work is dedicated to decolonizing the human spirit and to freeing people from what she calls "empire affective disorder."