The media cliché of the season is inspired by a man who seems all set to become the first Black President of the United States. An Obama for India is a liberal lament that we have now heard more times than we can count. But what is India really looking to emulate?
Moving past his slogans for change, his innate charisma and his buttery charm, Barack Obama’s biggest achievement may already be the fact that instead of using his Race as a perennial calling-card, he appears to have transcended it. The political debate has long since moved from whether White America is ready for Obama to ask instead whether all of Black America will stand by him. No wonder then that Obama — who was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan diplomat and a White woman from Kansas — has been subjected to merciless scrutiny on whether he is “Black enough”. The American media has drawn parallels between him and Tiger Woods. Woods, who is now glorified as an iconic, breaking-the barriers, Black Hero, was often derided in his early years for being more at home in the chi-chi and predominantly White world of professional golf than in Black society.
So the question now is whether inner-city Black America — the more radical and resentful voters — will see him as one of their own or a sell-out to the enemy. It’s a risk that the Presidential candidate has been willing to take. Race has hardly been the centerpiece of Obama’s campaign; he has made just one definitive speech on the racial divide through the entire election year. And when he disowned his own pastor’s incendiary remarks (among them a church sermon that declared 9/11 to be just punishment for America’s “terrorism”) and acknowledged that resentment in White America had its own legitimacy, Obama knew that he was risking a backlash among his own followers. Jesse Jackson — once America’s best-known Black politician, who also made a failed bid for President — was famously caught on an open mike saying he wanted to “cut Obama’s nuts off”.
But in the end, the gamble appears to have paid off and it has redefined American politics as well. A deeply racist society is now focusing on which Presidential candidate will deliver them from the economic meltdown and the administration’s foreign policy suicide missions, rather than on whether White is better than Black. This is Obama’s historic contribution: he has refused to keep his people locked into the role of victims.