Brian Cooney: Citizen Obama

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Brian Cooney

The critical scrutiny of Barack Obama's forthcoming presidency has already begun, even among his supporters. Do his early appointments suggest that he will keep his promises? Will his need for experienced associates tie him too closely to the political establishment he has vowed to "change?" This scrutiny is healthy and necessary. But we should never lose sight of the greatness of this moment in American history, the rich meaning in the simple fact of his election.

He has a biracial look that probably made him seem a little less alien to people who see African faces as alien. But when he stood with his wife and daughters on the stage at Chicago's Grant Park Tuesday night, there was no ethnic ambiguity. We saw a beautiful, clearly African-American family being cheered as the next occupants of the White House by a vast multi-racial audience. The scene was a vivid reminder that we Americans are not a race or nationality in the ethnic sense.

To the great discomfort of a shrinking minority of Americans, our country's sense of identity has changed radically from the white Protestant image of the 17th and 18th centuries. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, southern and eastern Europeans, Catholics and Jews were grudgingly accepted as "white enough" to become fully American.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1965 ended discriminatory immigration rules that admitted only token numbers of non-whites. This resulted in a huge influx of Asians and Latin Americans. The Census Bureau and the Pew Hispanic Center project that non-Hispanic whites will be a minority in the U.S. by 2050, as they are even now in California.

The INA became law in the same year as the Voting Rights Act (VRA) outlawed obstacles to blacks registering and voting in the South. In effect, the VRA was 95 years late in applying the 15th amendment of 1870, which gave the federal government authority to legislate against state interference with black voting rights. It also represented a further step back from the horrors of slavery, and empowered black politicians in the South.

All of these developments in America's racial history helped make possible the scene in Grant Park on election night. Yet so much of history is accidental and unforeseeable. Would Obama, even with his charisma and brilliance, have been elected without the combination of an unpopular war, a president who may well be the most unpopular and incompetent in our history, and an economic crisis? We will never know what was necessary or sufficient to take us over the top on November 4. But we can rejoice in all that Obama's victory symbolizes about overcoming our past and all that it makes possible for the future. Racism is far from finished, but it has been driven further into the back reaches of backward minds.

If Americans are not a race, then what unites us as a people? In a 232-year old nation of immigrants, a common history is not enough, especially when that history is a story as much of division as of unity. The language we have in common is spoken by several other countries. What's important is not the language we speak, but what we say and believe about ourselves as a national community. There is no such thing as a universal American religion. Even among American Christians, there are sharp divisions in doctrines and values.

The United States is the product of an evolving interpretation of a sentence in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The November 4 scene in Grant Park is only the latest reading of that sentence.

Barack Obama began his speech in Grant Park by stating that if there is anyone who "still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time," then "tonight is your answer." It was, he said, an "answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled."

There is power in that answer. It is not the violent power of armed forces or a planetary military command structure, not the industrial or financial power of a super-capitalist state. It is, instead, the "soft" power of 300 million people united in a multi-ethnic, multicultural community based on their shared humanity. This is the power we need to exert in the world, since it influences by the force of example while respecting the freedom of other peoples.

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION

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