Obama, or, history in black and white

By Carlos Alberto Montaner
March 20, 2008

(FIRMAS PRESS) Obama couldn't keep the issue of race from entering the campaign debate. Until then, he was a young, well-educated young man, a notable speaker with an attractive personality, seen as a liberal within the Democratic Party. He is, of course, an African-American, but that element was seen as something positive. Obama's possible triumph was somehow perceived as the definitive overcoming of an old conflict, whose point of departure was the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Lincoln in 1863, a document that originated the very long, tortuous and sometimes heroic process of the gradual incorporation of the black population to American society, on a footing of equality.

The controversy began with Obama's wife, Michelle, who is also educated and brilliant. She made a comment that many considered to be unpatriotic. She said that for the first time in her life she felt proud of the United States. Then she apologized and placed the remark in a different context. Later appeared the incendiary sermons of pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama's spiritual leader, an extremist Christian minister who espouses what he calls “the theology of black liberation.”

Wright feels he is the victim of some historical offenses he considers practically insuperable and opines that the United States provoked Al Qaeda's attacks on the Twin Towers with its cruel and selfish past behavior. The minister proposes that African-Americans sing “God Damn America” instead of “God Bless America.” Obama denied sharing his pastor's point of view. Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don't always agree with,” the candidate said.

It was impossible for the issue of race not to have leaped to the foreground of the electoral fray. After all, the so-called Founding Fathers, the patricians who gave content and form to the United States in the late 18th Century, were white males of British origin, generally Protestant, educated, economically powerful, and many of them owned slaves (at least 14 of the 55 who signed the 1787 Constitution.) It is not accidental, then, that the 43 U.S. presidents from George Washington in 1789 to George W. Bush in 2001 have invariably shared (more or less) those same ethnic and cultural features.

From those origins, a patriotic discourse was built, crafted with novel-like episodes, exemplary biographies, myths, battlefield and civic feats: the Boston Tea Party, the battle of Yorktown, Washington's honesty, Jefferson's intelligence, Madison's legal mind, Tom Paine's libertarian zeal, Franklin's wisdom, and a thousand other harmless and constructive anecdotes. Above all, the cult of the moral superiority of the then-young republic -- the land of the free and the home of the brave.

To be an American, in addition to coming under the protection and authority of the law, meant the spiritual burden of assuming the national heritage as one's own. Therefrom derived the secret links of the tribe, the ties that thrill and bind human beings, the bonds that explain people's emotion at the sound of the national anthem and the sight of the waving flag.

How does Obama fit into a history that is obviously strange and remote to him? The ethnic group to which he belongs is not part of that epic tale. When Obama thinks about George Washington, he cannot forget that Washington owned slaves, and when he quotes from the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, he cannot forget the hypocrisy of some patriots who proclaimed the intrinsic equality of all men but kept in bondage hundreds of thousands of slaves who were kidnapped in Africa and sold and treated like animals in America.

This does not mean that Obama is disloyal to the United States, but that his affective ties to the American nation follow different paths. His patriotism is civic, constitutional, republican. It is based not on a common emotion but on an intellectual elaboration and certain personal experiences. He feels American because he shares with almost the entire nation a language, cultural features, and a way to understand today's social and political reality, but he knows that his historic DNA contains factors that differ from those that have traditionally defined the American mainstream.

According to the polls, Obama today would defeat John McCain by a margin larger than Hillary Clinton's. I am not sure that that will be the picture next November, when the elections are held. The ban on the racial issue has been lifted and the ethnic factor begins to play a very important role. McCain is the continuer of an old, tribal tradition anchored in the nation's origins. Obama does not fit that mold. The contest is no longer a rational dilemma. Emotions, prejudices and perceptions are on the table. And Obama might hold the losing card.

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