Just how “emancipated” are we white westerners? What is the acid test? Electing a black man as president of the US, or smiling weakly at the black doctor who we have just been told is going to perform a complex surgical manoeuvre on our heart?
I suspect many of us may be ready for the first, but not so sure about the second. It doesn’t seem that long ago that, on an aeroplane to India, I walked up to the cockpit to see if it really was brown men flying that great big 747. These days I fly all over Africa with all-black crews and only worry when I’m in Nigeria, not because the pilots are black but because the airline industry imposed no safety standards until recently.
Nevertheless, the fact that Barack Obama is now the frontrunner to be the next American president is a remarkable historical event, not just for him, not just for America, but for us, the white man, who for so long dominated the world and dismissed black, yellow and brown people as “coons,” “niggers” or “boys.” Only 30 or so years ago I was taken out to lunch by the op-ed editor of the New York Times, who, aware of my close association with Martin Luther King’s movement from the time when I had worked in the slums of Chicago as a volunteer, asked me if I thought that when you really got to know “them,” they were really the same as “us.”
It was while working in Dr King’s movement that I learned what a combustible business race was—not just the reaction of white Chicagoans when challenged, but the tensions within the movement itself. The white students who came to help were intent on living some kind of idyllic multiracial life. But in the end their behaviour was insulting, even overbearing. As Dr Alvin Pouissant, the psychiatrist who was in charge of all the medical work in the civil rights movement, observed, “They were bent on showing how ‘free’ they were around black people, and would indulge in all manner of unconventional behaviour in the Negro community which the black workers felt they would never dare exhibit back home with their own kind.” As Stokely Carmichael pungently put it later, “They were trying to come alive through the black community.”
Many of the white female student volunteers seemed to believe they could assuage the guilt of centuries by making themselves easily available to black men. Poussaint graphically called this a “White Africa Queen complex.” Inevitably this brought out bitter resentment from the black girls. Poussaint wrote: “So much energy was expended by both black males and females in discussing the problems created by white girls in particular that on many days little project work was accomplished. In addition it became clear that local black people were becoming extremely frightened by inter-racial liaisons and thus frequently refused to co-operate with the project work.”
In May 1966, Stokely Carmichael was elected chairman of the student wing of the civil rights movement. It was his call for “black power” that split the civil rights movement down the middle. Yes, the young wanted a more confrontational policy than Dr King, but a good part of the resentment that blew up inside them had been fed by their own humiliating experiences inside the movement.
Ironically, it is white women that pose the biggest threat to the Obama campaign. They vote in much larger numbers for Hillary Clinton. Part of this phenomenon reminds me of my first visit to South Africa in 1961. The men, although illiberal by my lights, would think nothing about having a social chat with one of their black colleagues, even a beer. But their wives, if they heard about it, were enraged. Maybe this had something to do with the role of white middle-class women in those days. They were housewives and it is a human trait that many of us need someone below us to intimidate in order to feel secure. The men had their wives and their work, but the wives only their servants.
We whites are not quite there yet. But who would have dared say only a generation ago that a presidential candidate in our lifetime would be judged not by the colour of his skin, but also by the content of his character? Dr King’s dream has come true.
Obama is grown-up and has extraordinary self-knowledge. He has gone though his black pride rebellion, has tried drugs, has admitted it and has discussed his adolescence in two books. He is confident, easy in his skin and is not touchy, defensive or secretive. Whether they can articulate it or not, these character attributes communicate themselves to others. A man who is relaxed about admitting mistakes and is comfortable about negotiating with those he disagrees with, rather than banging the table and losing his temper, is exactly the sort of person who should lead a modern democracy and have his finger on the nuclear trigger.
I think that Obama will be a very good President. I have always thought that the origin of a person or the race of a person doesn’t count too much, but only his/her capacities.
“it is white women that pose the biggest threat to the Obama campaign. They vote in much larger numbers for Hillary Clinton”.
Strange comment - why attribute a racial, rather than a gender, preference here? And isn’t it republicans, rather than women, who will be the real obstacle to Obama’s presidential campaign?
Anyway, Obama’s only half black. It’s an odd feature of America that there is so much obsession with race that if somebody has even one grandparent of African descent they are described as ‘black’, even though they’re only one quarter black. It reflects the fear of contamination, I suppose - what is not pure white is back