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I've been wanting to write something about the rise of Barack Obama for a while, even though I'm not an American and even though my understanding of the American presidential race is filtered through Australian media reports. What I want to write about isn't so much the intricacies of the campaign, so much as how he as a minority got there, and what that means.
I saw a documentary done by an Australian TV show called Four Corners which gauged the response of African Americans to Obama. They seemed to fall into two camps: the people who were really on board with his identity and his campaign, and the people who felt that he wasn't suitable, either because he wasn't 'black enough' because of his half-white, half-Kenyan background, or because they thought he was compromising himself too much just by running.
It's the sort of schism you see a lot in minority groups. The disability sector has it too, women's lib definitely has it. It's basically the people who want an 'us versus them' conflict based approach to bettering society against the people who want to lay down arms and negotiate. Both sides have their pros and cons. Being conflict based is very black and white (no pun intended), you always know where you stand and you have a strong moral basis - you are 'right' and the other side is clearly not. You go for, and get, very clear-cut advances like changes to law or swaying public opinion for your cause. But because it's conflict based you come across as, well, adversarial. People are less likely to identify with you. You will always seem to be on the other side of the fence no matter what you do, so you have a self-fulfiling prophecy of being kept down to a certain extent because you can't be truly integrated if people automatically think of you as more disadvantaged.
Negotiating avoids that problem by firstly making sure that people are comfortable with who you are, but it does so with some sacrifices. To make people comfortable enough with who you are to be able to ask for what you want, you have to enter mainstream institutions like good schools, universities, and company jobs as one of them. To do that, you often have to be able to let go of whatever it is that makes you different, or to be able to slide it under the carpet. Barack Obama would have spent time ignoring racist jokes and wearing Anglo haircuts and fashions, just like I've spent a lot of my life trying to smile as I go through situations where I can't hear or see properly, or where people assume I'm not able to understand them.
So what does negotiation achieve that's so valuable if it means losing a critical part of yourself? In Obama's case it means being able to open a door that has never been opened before: a black man as nominee for American President. In my case, and probably the lives of many other people who live as minorities, it's less tangible. Ironically, it seems as though going through all that trouble to make people forget what you are is done in the name of getting to a place where you can quietly ask them to remember who and what you are without fear that you won't be heard. It's creating a path for other people who come behind you. You may not know the next generation - Martin Luther King didn't get to live to see this - but you do what you can for them. You try to give the spirit to the laws and sentiments brought about by the conflict-oriented people.
See, that's the thing. The two may look like direct opposites, but really they're just different sides of the one coin. I think you need people who do both in the world, and you're only ever going to get someone from the 'negotiation' school of minority politics in a role like President of the US, because becoming a political leader of any stripe requires negotiation and self sacrifice. What you 'win' will depend on how you view a win, who is your enemy will depend on how strict you are. You might see others 'in your midst' as traitors for taking the other line, and that's the hardest thing to reconcile so that everyone can move forward. The natural next question is "how do you do that?" and I just don't know. Maybe you cherish all the victories, even the ones you hadn't seen in the first place. Maybe you find a time for your anger, and a time to set it aside.
Of course, all of this relies on the idea that the institutions around you are to a greater or lesser extent hostile, and not open to negotiation. I always thought it would be great to have institutions that weren't... until the Rudd Government came in, and I found my work-self flooded with consultations. Not only are consultations tricky beasts to manage - who's being consulted, what they're being asked, how much time they're given, how much input they have to the final output - so that someone inevitably feels dissatisfied, but firing off loads of them at once has the result of fatiguing people, and thus ensuring that they don't go doing too much proactive work to criticise you. Also: while you have lots of things 'under review' you can always be seen to be doing something about most issues, even if it is just reviewing them. I don't know how deliberate this has been in terms of political tactics, but that's certainly the effect it's having on me.
Anyway. Vague ramble ended.
I saw a documentary done by an Australian TV show called Four Corners which gauged the response of African Americans to Obama. They seemed to fall into two camps: the people who were really on board with his identity and his campaign, and the people who felt that he wasn't suitable, either because he wasn't 'black enough' because of his half-white, half-Kenyan background, or because they thought he was compromising himself too much just by running.
It's the sort of schism you see a lot in minority groups. The disability sector has it too, women's lib definitely has it. It's basically the people who want an 'us versus them' conflict based approach to bettering society against the people who want to lay down arms and negotiate. Both sides have their pros and cons. Being conflict based is very black and white (no pun intended), you always know where you stand and you have a strong moral basis - you are 'right' and the other side is clearly not. You go for, and get, very clear-cut advances like changes to law or swaying public opinion for your cause. But because it's conflict based you come across as, well, adversarial. People are less likely to identify with you. You will always seem to be on the other side of the fence no matter what you do, so you have a self-fulfiling prophecy of being kept down to a certain extent because you can't be truly integrated if people automatically think of you as more disadvantaged.
Negotiating avoids that problem by firstly making sure that people are comfortable with who you are, but it does so with some sacrifices. To make people comfortable enough with who you are to be able to ask for what you want, you have to enter mainstream institutions like good schools, universities, and company jobs as one of them. To do that, you often have to be able to let go of whatever it is that makes you different, or to be able to slide it under the carpet. Barack Obama would have spent time ignoring racist jokes and wearing Anglo haircuts and fashions, just like I've spent a lot of my life trying to smile as I go through situations where I can't hear or see properly, or where people assume I'm not able to understand them.
So what does negotiation achieve that's so valuable if it means losing a critical part of yourself? In Obama's case it means being able to open a door that has never been opened before: a black man as nominee for American President. In my case, and probably the lives of many other people who live as minorities, it's less tangible. Ironically, it seems as though going through all that trouble to make people forget what you are is done in the name of getting to a place where you can quietly ask them to remember who and what you are without fear that you won't be heard. It's creating a path for other people who come behind you. You may not know the next generation - Martin Luther King didn't get to live to see this - but you do what you can for them. You try to give the spirit to the laws and sentiments brought about by the conflict-oriented people.
See, that's the thing. The two may look like direct opposites, but really they're just different sides of the one coin. I think you need people who do both in the world, and you're only ever going to get someone from the 'negotiation' school of minority politics in a role like President of the US, because becoming a political leader of any stripe requires negotiation and self sacrifice. What you 'win' will depend on how you view a win, who is your enemy will depend on how strict you are. You might see others 'in your midst' as traitors for taking the other line, and that's the hardest thing to reconcile so that everyone can move forward. The natural next question is "how do you do that?" and I just don't know. Maybe you cherish all the victories, even the ones you hadn't seen in the first place. Maybe you find a time for your anger, and a time to set it aside.
Of course, all of this relies on the idea that the institutions around you are to a greater or lesser extent hostile, and not open to negotiation. I always thought it would be great to have institutions that weren't... until the Rudd Government came in, and I found my work-self flooded with consultations. Not only are consultations tricky beasts to manage - who's being consulted, what they're being asked, how much time they're given, how much input they have to the final output - so that someone inevitably feels dissatisfied, but firing off loads of them at once has the result of fatiguing people, and thus ensuring that they don't go doing too much proactive work to criticise you. Also: while you have lots of things 'under review' you can always be seen to be doing something about most issues, even if it is just reviewing them. I don't know how deliberate this has been in terms of political tactics, but that's certainly the effect it's having on me.
Anyway. Vague ramble ended.
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I don't think it's because he's not a Black Panther.
The other reaction I recall seeing (probably in the same docco) was fear that if he's too successful he'll be assassinated. That one mostly came from older Southern black women. From our (and probably his, too) perspective that seems ridiculous, but their experience of the world leads them to that conclusion.