Obama fever

Since he won a sweeping number of state primaries in the Super Tuesday primary contests, everyone in the United States, from television anchors to factory workers on production lines, seems to have caught Obama fever. So enraptured is the United States with its new hero, who has grabbed endorsements from unions, party leaders and even the Kennedys, that a popular Saturday night comedy show aired a spoof in which the hardest question television journalists could ask him was: “Are you comfortable Senator Obama?”
As far as his rival Hillary Clinton is concerned, Obama fever is proving to be a particularly virulent virus to fight. In recent television appearances Senator Clinton appears sulky and almost petulant at the attention being showered on her opponent whose charm has enraptured so many.
In a recent debate held in Cleveland, Ohio, she whined, before an incredulous audience of journalists that she “always received the first question in debates” suggesting that she was somehow being treated unfairly in media forums. Her annoyance is perhaps expected, as a recent editorial in the New York Times (which incidentally has endorsed Senator Clinton) opined, Hillary Clinton simply wasn’t ready to deal with a candidate whose magnetic appeal would so derail a candidacy she had all but taken for granted.
Commentators in the United States have had a field day with the rise of a candidate who is defying so many predictions about the United States electorate. First among these have obviously been those that said America was simply not ready for an African-American to lead the country. With America’s terrible record in race relations and the legacy of centuries of oppression, discrimination and slavery, it is indeed a surprise to see the near-meteoric rise of a man who has little political experience and belongs to a group who as recently as the 1960s was legally relegated to second-class citizenship.
Add to this the fact that Barack Obama’s father was Kenyan and Muslim and you have a candidate that at least theoretically had the worst chances to lay such a claim to the Democratic nomination.
Moving past the gushing praise and laudatory rhetoric however, it is important to consider what Barack Obama’s candidacy means for African Americans in the United States and for non-white people around the world. Would his win of the Democratic nomination and eventual election as leader of the world’s only superpower predict change for the racial power dynamics that pit white against black in America and colonists versus colonised in the rest of the world?
In the domestic context of the United States, the very route that Obama has taken, one of rising above his race, has met criticism from some commentators. In his book A bound man: Why we are excited about Obama and why he cant win, Shelby Steele, an African-American intellectual, accuses Obama of presenting himself as a “protestor” to blacks and a “unifier” to whites, an inherently deceptive message which Steele insists means that Obama cannot serve the interests of one race without relegating the aspirations of the other to the back burner.
Indeed, Steele may not be alone in making such an assertion. Euphoric as his supporters may seem now, Obama’s candidacy has been an act of treacherous navigation. Like his friend Devaal Patrick who was recently elected Governor of Massachusetts, Obama belongs to a generation of African-American politicians who never personally experienced a segregated America: where blacks went to separate schools, weren’t served at restaurants and were prevented from staying at motels.
This new generation presents itself only secondarily as blacks and primarily as capable of rising above racial politics. If you define blackness as being raised in black culture, and dealing with problems pervasive in the black community — gang warfare, high unemployment, breakdown of family structures — then Obama appears only physically black.
Obama’s being black has significance not simply in America, but also in international contexts. For centuries, the colonist/colonised divide has been drawn along racial lines with whiteness being identified with colonial superiority and being coloured with primitive subjection.
Will having a black man leading the world’s only superpower suggest that at least some of the racial overtones dividing the world have finally been overcome? Are we finally living, as some commentators suggest, in a world where race no longer signifies anything? If a black man born to a Kenyan father can become President of the United States, have we attested to the mobility of identity and the triumph of self over immutable characteristics such as race?
The question of the international significance of America electing an African-American president is likely to meet with even more opposition. Similar to those who would say that Obama is unfairly claiming blackness as an identity without having borne the class burdens of race discrimination, most people actually living in post-colonial societies are likely to disagree that the mere presence of a black man at the helm of the United States government is likely to eradicate the legacy of inequities that colonialism has left behind.
But the argument is not simply of whether Obama can either eradicate the legacy of discrimination confronted by African-Americans or reduce some of the deep-seated mistrust that exists between the colonial and the colonised worlds. In a sound-byte world, symbols are meaningful, even if only in the minimal way of reminding us that the possible sometimes trumps the probable.
Realistically, Barack Obama’s election may bring little change in the living conditions of African-Americans living in American cities that face double-digit unemployment and high rates of incarceration. Indeed it may change even less in a world dominated by superpowers and their commitment to strategic interests over global welfare.
However, in this world of symbols where winning hearts and minds is often at the core of the political game, Obama’s mere presence presents a welcome testament to the power of possibility.

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney living in the United States where she teaches courses on Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy. She can be contacted at rafia.zakaria@gmail.com