It is righteous to see a bro in “da House,” especially when he is superbly eloquent, intelligent, classy, sassy, sleek and chic, more or less moral (but not smug) and somehow inspirationally bourgeois, a rock-solid citizen with all the right stuff.
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U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama’s epochal ascension nukes instantly all the noxious voodoo science alleging black “inferiority” due to less evolved brains and super sexual endowments.
Obama deserved to win the White House because he had the best campaigns, trouncing both Hillary and Bill-the-Surrogate Clinton in the Democratic Party primaries and the Republicans, taking states that hadn’t chosen a Democrat in generations. That’s real black power.
His victory means that Black History Month has just gone Black History 24/7. Almost everything Obama does will be historic.
When Obama took the presidential oath on January 20, I felt, and still feel, like many black people around the globe, a panoply of positive psychic effects.
But I also still feel, sometimes, a strange sense of disbelief. One of “us” is running the biggest show on earth, but it doesn’t feel real.
There’s a disconnection between Obama’s political triumph and grassroots black mobilization. In short, the black president was elected because white voters deemed him only incidentally black.
A vote is a vote, and it was proper that folks voted for Obama because he was the superior candidate rather than because they wanted to support black progress or racial equality.
Though many link Obama’s ascension to power to Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement, suggesting that “I Have A Dream” leads directly to “Yes We Can,” that connection is fallacious.
King led a black-based though interracial mass movement Obama won office by attracting a bare majority of individual voters, and decidedly not by appealing to racial themes.
Thus, while his blackness is of the utmost symbolic importance, it is erroneous to consider Obama primarily a black president.
Rather, he is the first global president – that is, the first the world would have chosen, opinion polls indicate, had the world had a vote.
His campaign was not only race-transcendent but also transnational, including crowd-pleasing photo ops in Berlin, London and the Middle East. He is the president of the planet, at least metaphorically, and that is an awesome advance for African-heritage peoples everywhere.
And yet, in the end, it really isn’t about us – unless, that is, Obama fails, is caught in a scandal (unlikely) or commits some catastrophic blunder.
Obama will be seen by his contemporaries and by future historians as a great president. Part of his greatness will arise from his cancellation of the crusading Gothicism of the previous incumbent, dumping the Dark Ages in favour of the Enlightenment.
But his greatness will largely reside in his having the wisdom to choose the right policies, the charisma to persuade others of their rightness, the intelligence to implement them properly, the gumption to admit errors and the agility to correct them expeditiously.
How much bearing will his blackness have on any of that? And should it?
Obama’s global symbolic significance is compelling, reminding us that it’s high time our prime minister be Inuit, the Ontario premier be Chinese, Quebec’s premier be Haitian, that a Sikh head the Mounties and a Latina host CBC-TV’s The National – in short, that Canadian institutions and organs of power, all of them, become as obviously multicultural and multiracial as we the people now are.
George Elliott Clarke’s newest books are Blues And Bliss: The Poetry Of George Elliott Clarke, edited by Jon Paul Fiorentino (Wilfrid Laurier University), and I & I (Goose Lane), a verse novel.
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