The Nation that Stops a Race....Until Now

Apologies for no video but I will post them when I find them.

I am currently looking for analysis of how and why Obama won, and the below article I think is the BEST explanation for why the USA finally has a Black President




The Nation that stops a Race

Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, Australia
Peter Hartcher
November 5, 2008


SOMETIMES when Barack Obama waited outside a restaurant for the valet to bring his car, a white couple would toss him their car keys. He endured this and all the petty humiliations of the black man in America.

Yet he never allowed his anger to take over and he never surrendered to the tightly boxed confines of racial expectations. He was always determined to break what he calls "the psychological shackles of slavery and Jim Crow [segregation]".


And he and his wife try to protect their two young daughters from being snared by the lingering culture of post-slavery despair: "Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb," he writes, "about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should be."

Before African Americans could persuade whites that they could hold high office, they have had to convince themselves first.

But what's Obama's secret? He goes to today's US election as the favourite to become the most powerful man in the world. How did he resist the mindset of racial limitations that has bound generations of African-Americans for the 143 years since the abolition of slavery?

As with Colin Powell, until now the black man who ascended higher than any other in America, Obama's family came from outside mainstream African-American society and never fully joined.

Asked the secret of his success, Powell, the former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, emphasised that his parents were immigrants from Jamaica.

The British ended slavery in the Caribbean more than a generation before the Americans got around to it and they set up compulsory schooling and allowed blacks to work in the civil service.

As a result, Powell said, Jamaicans had "an opportunity to develop attitudes of independence, self-responsibility and self-worth. They did not have their individual dignity beaten down for 300 years, the fate of so many black American slaves and their descendants."

Similarly, Obama's parents were not part of the African-American experience. Obama's father, an immigrant from Kenya, was a senior government economist who left his wife and two-year-old son in Hawaii to study at Harvard University.

His mother, white and from the mid-western US state of Kansas, was an independent-minded woman who earned a PhD in anthropology. She worked in rural development in Indonesia, where she married her second husband, an Indonesian geologist who ended up as a public relations consultant for the US oil company Mobil.


As Obama has said: "My own upbringing hardly typifies the African-American experience."

Colin Powell remarked that one of the reasons he was able to progress to the very highest post in the US Armed Forces was that "I speak reasonably well, like a white person".

Likewise, Barack Obama, as a student one of the most brilliant young lawyers of his generation at Harvard, has perfect grammar, an urbane accent and only ever play-acts at speaking like a working class African American.

As he told a rally this week as he criticised a policy of his rival, John McCain: "That ain't right," echoing a Chris Rock movie character, an accidental know-nothing presidential candidate in the film Head Of State. And then Obama continued: "Not only is it not right, it ain't right," he smiled. He can visit Bubba's neighbourhood, he was demonstrating, but he doesn't live there.

Another vital aspect of the success of Powell and Obama is that they are not threatening.

Powell's cousin, Bruce Llewellyn, chairman of the Philadelphia Coca-Coca Bottling Company and the richest black man in the US, contrasted Powell with Jesse Jackson: "Jesse scares white people, because he really sounds like a fiery zealot, like he might just jump up and say, 'F--- you!' and hit you in the mouth."

As Powell himself put it: "I don't shove it in their face, you know? I don't bring any stereotypes or threatening visage to their presence. Some black people do."

Obama's calm and measured manner reassures white audiences, though some remain apprehensive. As Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University, explained it: "Obama's been very careful to distance himself from the traditional Jesse Jackson agenda and the Jesse Jackson persona. A lot of people are worried about voting for him because they think once he's elected the mask will fall off and there'll be an angry Jesse Jackson underneath."

But Obama doesn't carry the anger that many African Americans bear as part of their harsh historical experience. That's because he does not come from that experience.

When American commentators call him a "post-racial" candidate, what they are really observing is that he is a post-slave culture candidate. Obama has talked about the African Americans' tendency to protect themselves psychologically by assuming the worst: "I've had some blacks tell me, 'We've been trying for 300 years, and it hasn't worked yet."'

Obama, unburdened by the brutal history of the American negro, instead assumes the best. He has persuaded millions of other Americans, of all colours, that the best is within reach.