Nodding to Professor Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. at his Whaling Church panel discussion Achieving Equality in the Age of Obama last night, Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell shook her head and said: ”If you had told me this time last year, when we were all pretty emotionally up and excited, even though George W. Bush was still our President, that we would actually feel worse a year later, when Barack Obama was our President, about questions of race in America, I would have told you you were lying.”

Just before 10 a.m. on opening day, the livestock pens, fried food booths and motionless carnival rides staked in the grounds of the 148th annual Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Show and Fair were unpeopled and peaceful in the last minutes before the gates opened to a zealous huddle of fairgoers eager to be among the first to sample the spectacles awaiting inside.

Wayne Mallory kept an old dish soap bottle full of water handy as he gradually lit a porchful of paper and silk lanterns at his rental cottage just across from the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs Wednesday night. He and his wife, Linda, laughingly referred to the bottle as their fire hose, to be used in case a mishap resulted from using real candlelight to illuminate the lanterns, as opposed to the electric lights that have gained popularity in the past few decades. The lantern collection belongs to Dr. Albert Alexander, and several pieces date back over a hundred years.