Know Your Place
Wednesday, November 5
Let's hope for some audacity
It takes a lot to melt my cynical old heart, but I stayed up most of last night, and Obama's victory speech was genuinely moving, and genuinely impressive. The simple fact of having an American president who can string a sentence together without looking like a constipated baboon would have been improvement enough, but here's a guy with poetry in his soul. Here's a genuinely impressive man. Maybe he could even become a great one. I can't remember ever being impressed by an American president but, for now at least, I'm impressed by this one.
After a night like that, of course, the inevitable disappointment will only seem worse, so it might be worth reminding ourselves now that there's no such thing a a radical American president. I suspect that those who are expecting some huge step change in America's attitude to the world will be disappointed. And there are some cynical voices out there already; some of them quite funny.
But never mind, at least for now. Obama is Not Bush, and in a world of such chronically low expectations as we currently live in, that's a good start.
A final thought: we have heard ad nauseum, and will continue to hear, about the significance of Obama as 'America's first black president.' But of course, Obama is not black, he's mixed race. I don't say this in a pedantic or sneery way: quite the oppposite. Speaking as a whitey, I actually think that a mixed-race president is possibly more significant than a black one - though I wouldn't deny the massive significance of this for African Americans - because what it demonstrates above all is that ethnicity is not fixed, that race is not immutable, that ghettoisation is not inevitable and that competition between 'cultures' and races is neither necessary nor natural.
It demonstrates to me that we can not only all live together, but that we can love each other too. Hell, we can even marry each other and produce brilliant mixed-race babies who go on to inspire the world. That, more than blackness or whiteness, is the real message of hope for me in this. Here's to less ethnic retrenchment, and more colour-blind human mixing.
Posted by Paul at 3:45 PM 
2 Comments
Nice sentiment. Here here to colorblind mixing. It's weird that the child of someone of African geographical background and someone of European geographical background is considered 'black'. Is it like a stain or something, that it needs a few generations to wash out? I guess 'black' just means 'not white'.
I hope that my son's generation (he's <1) will find the concept of 'race' bizzare and antiquated.
Hi Paul,
Nice post. It's a bit confusing as to how one should feel re Obama tbh. On the one hand, as you point out, we have a "mixed-race" guy effectively as the most man on the planet, thereby highlighting the fallacy of race as a concept and also showing how far we've come in certain ways.
But on the other hand, he is the figurehead for the most abominable and irrational authority on the planet and already a certifiable war criminal with scores of peoples' blood on his hands (I'm not going to judge him any differently in this respect than I did GW Bush)!
I went to a public talk last night by a black US anarchist here who's doing a speaking tour atm. With respect to Obama I can't even imagine the contradictory emotions he feels as he was originally a very militant Black Panther member and then after years in prison (and thankfully somewhat of an epiphany leading away from raw socialism) an anarchist convert! Anyway, thought i'd share that:P hope all's well
