My President is Black

Writing about web page http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/11/20/obama-shelby-steele-oped-cx_pr_1121robinson.html

On a trip to Washington and Philadelphia, it seems like everywhere there are Obama T-shirts on sale. Sometimes it's Obama on the front, sometimes with his smiling family, and often they are all wrapped up in the Stars and Stripes. Captions: "My Commander in Chief." And "My President is Black." I liked that one so much, I tried to get it for my wife, but they didn't have her size. I wondered why I wasn't trying to get one for myself, but they so much more didn't have my size, and anyway I thought the sequins wouldn't suit me.

Out on the street some black kids had set up a stall and were noisily telling a small audience not to fall for the Obama illusion. I looked at a placard and saw something about the lost tribes of Israel. I didn't read too closely because it seemed like a bad place to linger. A colleague wondered if they knew Al-Qaeda was trying to put the same message across. There must be hope -- Christians and Muslims coming together before Christmas!

Later, I read "An interview with Shelby Steele." Steele, like Obama, has a mixed racial heritage, but he resents Obama's victory. He rejects the proposition that Obama was a post-racial candidate. (It's a fact: I Googled "Obama" and "post-racial" and got 528,000 hits in 0.19 seconds.) Steele says white folks voted for Obama to prove they were not racist, and black folks voted for him to prove they were not inferior to whites. So, he says, Obama got elected because he is black.

I agree Obama is not "post-racial," whatever that means. The polls show clearly that black voters favoured him more than white voters. Still, Obama got a lot of white votes. The TV pictures showed clearly that a huge number of people around the world, black and white, are inspired that "My President is Black" -- even if for many Obama is not, strictly, their president. In fact, I am one of them. I think it's inspiring that Americans have elected Obama. But to claim that Obama was elected because he is black seems to me to have a firm grip on a seriously wrong end of the stick.

Let's think:

• Would the voters have put in anyone who was black? I don't think so.
• If Jesse Jackson had been the Democratic candidate, would he have won? Surely not.
• Politics aside, did Obama have to demonstrate a lot more competence and leadership than McCain to win? Probably. 

So, Obama was not elected just because he is black. Being black was not enough. Most likely, being as good as the white guy was not enough either. That's the down side: Obama had to be twice as good as the white guy to win. But there's an upside, too: being black did not stop him winning! So, my conclusion is: there's a double bonus in this. Good for Obama, and good for America!

All Obama has to do now is govern America and lead the free world for four years without messing up in a context of financial and environmental meltdowns, a military quagmire in the Middle East, America's global unpopularity, and an undefeated terrorist threat ... And, if he can do that, he can be reelected and get to do it again!

One more reason to be hopeful of America: The cab driver from my hotel to the Union station in Washington DC was talking on his cellphone in a language I could not begin to recognise. When he finished, I asked where he came from. "Afghanistan, seven years ago," he said. I asked how he liked it here. "You know," he said, "I feel at home. This is my country now."

I told the driver he was lucky not to have sought refuge in England; seven years on, he would be living miserably in the British equivalent of a refugee camp in Peshawar, and complete strangers would call him a Paki. That set him off in another direction, saying that Peshawar belonged to Afghanistan until the conniving British gave it to Pakistan. Later, I looked this up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshawar and the story does seem a little complicated, but it notes that "to this day many Afghans claim large swathes of Pakistani territory, including the bustling frontier cities of Peshawar and Quetta, rightfully belong to Afghanistan."

My driver said he was reading The Kite Runner, so in his honour and in honour of America I bought it at the next bookstore to read myself. At my conference in Philadelphia I told this story to an old friend. He told me he'd refused to read The Kite Runner, although his wife had read it, because the small midwestern college town where they live had adopted it under the slogan "One Town -- One Book!" Isn't that called totalitarianism? I asked. He smiled uneasily and changed the subject.

Mark Harrison : 23 Nov 2008 05:27 |  Tags: Cab-Drivers Obama Politics |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem