SIbilA – AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POETRY

THE OBAMA PHENOMENON PART TWO: THE PROMISE OF A RESTORATIVE JUSTICE MICRO-REVOLUTIONARY PARADIGM IN MULTIRACIAL AMERICA
John H. Stanfield, II

Introduction

What we are, that is, is what we are socialized into beginning the day we are born and even before according to researchers of infant development and that socialization is embedded in the paradigms, that is, the cognitive maps which those who rear us in families, religious settings, residential communities, schools, media, government, and other socializing agency significant others give us. As much as we enjoy making breaks in our human development into these broad sweeping chronologies such as primitive modern, post modern, in actual fact, we are a mixture of all three chronologies as early 21st century Western, Westernizing, Eastern, and Easternizing people depending upon where we are on this vast globe in which we all reside. It is the same when it comes to centuries, I guess. As much as we like to say that we are early 21st century post modern people, those of us in the urban centers of western and eastern nations, in many respects and in some very distinct circumstances and situations, we are not only still quite 20th century obviously since the end of that century chronologically is still so recent but in other respects we are centuries old. Just go to church during a Sunday and see what I mean as we go through the rites and rituals of an institution which dates back to the third century after the death of Christ.

Within the context of this observation, we have to admit that when it comes to still embracing the concept of race, we are very much 19th century people. Even though there have been, since the beginning of the  19th century and even before there have been advocates for doing away with race as a dehumanizing tool to justify feelings of superiority to rationalize exploiting, enslaving, and exterminating others and to subject others to the dungeons of society, it still continued to root itself and normalize and routinize over generations.Even though especially during the past sixty or so years, there has been mounting evidence by reputable social and life scientists that race is a myth which creates a dehumanizedd society in which the human dignity and integrity are taken away and perverted by both those on top and by those on the bottom, our paradigms of everyday life in societies in which race remains central or has become central. It has even become acceptable in some quarters, such as post modern theory and identity theories which essentialize ethnicities, calling us people of color, what ever that means, to celebrate and embrace something which is really quite dehumanizing since positively or negatively there is the presumption that people who look the same real or imagined have the same cultural traits, intellectual abilities, and other human qualities which tend to be random in populations and societies rather than fixated in constructed categories. This dehumanizing way of  presuming and assuming and thinking and acting on becomes like an addictive obsession and attraction in multiracialized societies in which so much energy is invested in presuming what people are or trying to figure out what people are so we can act accordingly.

But, it, meaning race, has proven to be immensely profitable emotionally as well as economically and politically  as a short hand for deciding how to choose and how to act and for determining status and  abilities no matter how erroneous the criterion is and so profitable economically and politically that our every day paradigms presumptions about the realness of race remain intact.

This has been the case in the United States until very recently and when I say very recently, I am referring to decades. The emergence of Barak Obama and the surprising reception he has been receiving with American voters, the media, and political and business leaders tells us much of a micro revolution which for decades has been excluded or marginal to the American mainstream which is beginning to become mainstreamed but of course, there is still very much of the old in beliefs still lurking around.  What this means is that like in science, in public culture and in private lives, so often micro- revolutionary paradigms are actually the gradual acceptance of ideas, customs, norms, values, ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling which are excluded and then gradually marginalized and then gradually accepted as the mainstream through time due to the crystallization of societal conditions which make the micro-revolutionary paradigm. After all, for decades, indeed for centuries, evolution was a micro-revolutionary paradigm long repressed by the power of the church which would become a dominant paradigm in the late nineteenth century in the work of Charles Darwin’s  The Origins of the Species due to the break down of church authority by that time, industrial urbanization, and the emergence of a secular economic elite in the United States which was much more embracing of the social interpretation of the evolution paradigm than their European counterparts.

I believe that no matter what happens to Obama´s candidacy, be it that he is actually elected or is not or does not even make it out of the national Democratic convention this summer, his presence is a symbol of a micro revolutionary paradigm which is beginning to dance around the edges of mainstreaming in American society. It is a paradigm of restorative justice that only a person with his demographic qualities and context of birth could articulate at this moment in American history. Be it as a candidate who does eventually get elected this time around or the next or becomes a catalyst who never wins the nomination, he has opened the door wider than any other public figure in moving towards a restorative model of the just American society which understands the dehumanizing stain of race and how distracting as well as destructive it is when it comes to bringing people together of all ancestries and other social backgrounds with common challenges in everyday life.

Barack Obama

Restorative Justice—What Is It?

Restorative justice is the recovery of our humanity. Restorative justice as a national public policy was popularized in the early 1990s by the work of Bishop Desmond TuTu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the earliest years of Black Majority Rule in post-apartheid South Africa. But, more fundamentally, restorative justice is a community and a societal practice dating back to the ancient times of indigenous peoples around the world as a way of restoring human dignity after some thing terrible has happened such as murder or theft or war.

Restorative justice as a process of becoming human again through becoming transparent and authentic open human beings has begun to be written about extensively over the past several years as public policy alternatives in regions of the world such as East Europe and East and Central Africa as recent sites of massive genocide. In this emerging  literature, on what restorative justice is as a way of living I dare say as well as a public policy as  the process of becoming human again is seen as being rooted in the assumption that whenever some thing terrible happens socially which destroys human beings en mass, be it episodes such as genocide or slavery and their institutionalizations or routinized systems such as poverty, ageism ,racism, sexism, or anti-religiosity, it dehumanizes the entire community, the entire society. Such horrible human episodes and systems dehumanize perpetrators as well as victims. Indeed, in the restorative justice framework, all involved are both perpetrators and victims. This is why the labor intensive and deeply painful process of restorative justice involves perpetrators and victims  sitting around  the same table, so to speak, and taking turns in articulating memories of what happened, then going through the process of confessing they all had a part in the horrible deed in some shape or form, and then going through the phase of  taking responsibility by apologizing and then going through a phase of asking for forgiveness, that is a request for understanding to at least co-exist and at best to embrace each other and live together, and then go through the phase of  restoring to each other that which was taken symbolically such as names and materially such as land which represent human dignity, and then to enter the phase of a new way of living sustained through new support systems and new social circles which continue to confirm  the humanity of those who I used to see as less than human.  This intense process of becoming human again which takes so much humility and transparency makes restorative justice a very difficult perspective to grasp let alone embrace and implement in daily life and in public policy formation and implementation in societies based on cultures of retribution and cultures of blame and in cultures which place no value on self reflection and accountability. It is no wonder then that besides marginally in the area of criminal justice concerns, there is hardly any mention in the United States of restorative justice as a viable public policy alternative let alone as a way of daily life and as a type of valuation and even identity. And the same can be said of so many other societies which experience difficulty in acknowledging and working through pain of past wrongs which have violated the dignity of our fellow human beings which results in the dehumanization of all societal members.

A model protesting against Bush's visit to São Paulo in 2007

2008 as watershed point in American politics and dominant culture

This is why the 2008 election year in American politics and culture is so fascinating and so historically important. It is in so many ways a watershed point in a society which has engaged in an unintentional natural social experiment in restorative justice which in bits and pieces has appeared here and there in the societal landscape since the ending of World War I in 1918 and in some cases much, much earlier in American colonial and national history. The 2008 primary season in the United States has already gone down in American history as being the most diversified political season the nation has ever seen populated with leading candidates  representative of populations historically  excluded or marginalized in the race for the greatest prize in American  and  international politics, of course, the U.S. Presidency which has usually been restricted to White males affluent through inheritance or through mobility, married once or since Reagan twice, and  Protestant or since Kennedy, Catholic as well.. The idea that a Mormon or a more than twice married person or a woman or a black person could be taken seriously as a Presidential candidate  on either side of the Democratic or Republican political aisle was at best, until now  a fantasy for novel writers or for the imaginations of  film producers. But in 2008 it is happening. As well, no matter who wins in November 2008, there will be a President in the White House who belies conventional thinking about the cultural imagery and the cultural functions of the U.S. Presidency. And one of those  new things is having a President who does not think conventionally about race not only for politically correct reasons in a society which demands that public figures put on good public smiles when it comes to saying the right things though, perhaps,  privately being racially prejudiced but due to having certain beliefs derived from having value systems  which come through the labor intensive painful experiences it takes to understand the humanity of others and therefore your own humanity.

We  have as the Republican candidate  John McCain, a white male  who is viewed as a maverick who lost his sense of gender  privilege and the social privilege of coming from a distinguished military family as a tortured and tormented  prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and a half years. It was a kind of  social death from which he was resurrected and once you die socially the way McCain did as a prisoner of war, there is nothing on this earth which can hurt you so you might as well be who you are. As is widely known, on numerous occasions, McCain has broken from his party and has disagreed with his party’s President on campaign financing reform, the tobacco industry, and on the Iraqi war which in other ways he supports. The Wall Street Journal editors reminded their readership soon after he secured enough delegates for the nomination that McCain may be a Republican but did not always line up with business as Republican candidates for the U.S. Presidency usually do. McCain’s social stands have made the evangelical and conservative wings of the Republican Party suspicious of him. One of those social issues which have not been fully expressed in the mass media is McCain’s views on race. He is a supporter of affirmative action though not of quotas. More than that, in the early 1990s his wife and he adopted a distinctly colored child from Bangladesh. Even though much has been made out of the how much the wealth of his   wife and her family aided McCain in launching his political career what is not as well known to the American public is that the corporation from which his wife draws her wealth, Anehuser Busch Brewery, is well known in business circles as being an award winning corporation when it comes to diversity and inclusion policies. If you haven’t already, go to the John McCain for President website and read the speech he gave in honor of the 40th anniversary of King’s death. It is very interesting though telling that his spell binding words of admiration for King have not been publicized by a media which has much more difficulty with a white man than with a white woman or with a person of color irrespective of gender who dares to talk straight about race even  to the point of apologizing for his own past errors such as voting against the effort to make King’s birthday into a national holiday early in his political career. And please  realize that one of the candidates for the vice presidential spot on McCain’s  ticket is a woman who he has called on more than one occasion a great American and seems to have no problem with her being increasingly mentioned as a possible choice  for the vice president spot in the national media: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Bush and McCain

Bill Clinton’s progressive views on race can be traced to his childhood and adolescent experiences with African Americans while growing up in Arkansas. Well before Hillary  met Bill , she had begun her own journey in developing a value system which has given her much empathy for black people. It probably began in her comfortable middle class suburban home in Chicago with a father who insisted early on that his children see how the other side lived and took them to the predominantly black Southside to drive his point home. Throughout Hillary’s college and her law school years, the  circles of integrated  black  and white friends she was involved in socially  became spaces for her to develop a justice oriented value system which was more empathetic than the sympathetic and thus paternalistic way too many progressive whites tend to view people of color. Thus, when it is said that Hillary has a loyal black following, it should not be seen in the usual sense of paternalistic political support. She has deeply rooted friends who happen to be black.  I should add that Bill and Hillary Clinton’s deep emotional ties in black life have been demonstrated in so many ways which have yet to be made public. For instance, while Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas Hillary and he virtually adopted a brilliant young African American man who they felt would be destined to become the first black governor of the state and to go even further. Among other things, the young man scored the highest in the S.A.T. in the state of Arkansas in the year he took it. The Clinton’s sponsored his admission to Yale where he excelled brilliantly. Unfortunately, around the time he was due to graduate or shortly thereafter, the young man was killed in an automobile accident. A lost which still pain the Clintons.

Bill Clinton’s gaffes  which were interpreted as efforts to racialize Barak Obama during the primary season and the firing of Geraldine Ferro from Hillary Clinton’s campaign finance team due to her racially insensitive remarks may have alienated black voters who do not know her personally but not those who know her personal history and more than that, know  her. Meanwhile, a media which is having a hard time dealing with a serious woman contender for the Presidency in mainstream party politics, is having a more difficult time dealing with a transformed  white woman with a well developed and well tested value system when it comes to considering people as human beings rather than as superior or inferior races or just as races.

But, as the primary rivalry dragged on and when it became more than apparent that Obama had the nomination locked up, Hillary would defy her own upbringing and become white in her desperate attempt to remind white voters that she was one of them and he was not. But, by that time, it was too late and all she displayed shamefully that even the most progressive whites can and often do still harbor a grain of racial prejudice which in desperation is used when they are desperately pushed against the wall.

Certainly, this problem with the limits of white progressivism has been seen before in black liberation movements. There were abolitionists who may have been against slavery but still viewed blacks as being inferior and so when freedom came, blacks were not welcomed in their communities, clubs, or universities. There were the white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s who turned against any black  beneficiary who dared to show even a minute streak of independence. There were the whites who dropped out of the civil rights movements  of the 1960s and 1970s after it became apparent that blacks were not going to allow them to be in control of their organizations. There are the 1960s liberals who turned into neoliberals and right wingers after black demands for higher university access was elevated from student admission to recruiting, tenuring, and promoting black faculty. So, as sad as it is, both Hilary and Bill Clinton have displayed the degree to which they now belong to this soiled record of white progressivism and a lesson in how difficult it really is to transform into open people in a multiracial society in which historically speaking race is made into and used as a political weapon with a trigger which can only be pulled by those who deep down still harbor bigotries which even they wished they never had but do and use them when politically expedient.

Dead Iraqi civilian in Baghdad

Obama !!

And in this cultural sea change bubbling up so unexpectedly in American politics we have the extraordinary  achievements of U.S. Senator from the state of Illinois  Barak Obama who was not even elected to the U.S. Senate yet when he gave his rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. The speech would rocket him into national prominence in ways unimaginable in national politics. He was supposed to wait his turn if he was going to have a turn at all as a Democratic Party candidate. “If at all” is a key phrase since after all, in American cultural terminology, he is a Black man, and there was not even a hint that 2008 would be the so called right time for a Black person to be viewed as a serious presidential candidate. It was similar to the rather sudden rise of a black civil rights leader in 1955 residing in, of all places, Montgomery Alabama, the heartland of the violent prone legally segregated deep south. May be a poker player, but no one betting on horses would have put money on a civil rights movement with such regional, national, and international influence would occur through the emergent leadership of a black man who came from a respectful though not the most prestigious family circles of his Atlanta, Georgia community and who would rise to the occasion to lead a bus boycott though he never really lead anything all that big before he recently became pastor of the most elite black church in Montgomery. Of course, I am talking about the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. which took every one off guard, the media, the white and black establishment, the state and federal governments, and the academic experts.

American anomie and the civic healer

The rise of Obama as a secular prophet who as more than one commentator says, rises more and more as more and more people go and hear him   about the road to change has much to do with several factors. The major factor which has to do more with historical and cultural need than race is that Obama has the message for a public with anxious ears and excited  hearts wishing and dreaming about change which will re-establish hope and faith in a society in deep civic  crisis with declining international prestige. The massive quality of life problems in the United States which cut across class, ancestry, and gender— uncontrolled personal debt, the soaring costs of health care, education, and housing; massive   unemployment and other mobility problems; lost of major industry abroad, and  negative domestic affects of the war in Iraq,  are some of the major problems which are binding most  Americans  together in a bond of deepening misery and despair. And this bond of deepening misery and despair is massaged by a mainstream mass media with opinion polls which are increasingly out of touch; a mainstream media more concerned with letting us know about the latest regarding Brittany Spears and her pregnant sister  or  gossip about the latest guest on the Oprah Winfrey show than soberly informing American viewing, listening, and reading audiences  what is really going on around us, what is really happening to  us and what is really happening to others around the world.

Generation gaps between the old and young are common place in all societies. In contemporary America, the distance between the baby-boomer generation, those  Americans that is between 48 and 63 on the average,  and their children and grandchildren embedded in a multicultural hip hop, My Space culture  is particularly a deep cold ocean. When one thinks of both perceived and real  leadership blunders of baby-boomer leaders who began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s such as the Enron scandal, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal,  scandals in religion and in science, the building of a massive prison complex with no rehabilitation relief for the ex-incarcerated,  the seemingly lack of resources to deliver quality k-12 education and the super pricing of college education,   the deepening neglect of care for children and families and the earlier mentioned quality of life problems in the United States, it is no wonder that so many young Americans are disillusioned. And their disillusionment is shown in the increase in suicide among the young, the increase in stress related diseases among the young, the number of suicide murders involving young people, and so many other tragic indicators of this widening gulf between the old and the young. The generational gap problem in the United States is certainly symptomatic of the break down of basic civic culture in American residential communities and in American public life sectors which scholars and opinion leaders have been commenting on during the past ten years such as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Our sense of civic belonging and social bonding has been replaced with living amongst strangers, including our own children and spouses and certainly our neighbors who we do not know any more. Fear, suspicion, and social cynicism have replaced norms of trust, loyalty, and social optimism in an over spending mass consumer society with its back against the wall. In the spirit of late nineteenth century sociologist Emile Durkheim, the breakdown and fragmentation of traditional moral regulators such as families, faith communities, educational systems, and media have  all tossed  many if not most Americans into the deep pit  of anomie, that is a massive state of social rootlessness with drifting identities and massive lost of  personal purpose and  social intention.

So Obama in chronological  age and in  inspirational perspective is the inspirational leader emerging generations of highly alienated young people and highly frustrated progressive older Americans have been waiting  to arrive for a very long time, especially since we have begun to drift into this phase of a society becoming unglued through polarization, massive alienation,  declining global prestige and in a society in which we have grown accustomed to talking past each other or at each other rather than talking with each other and a powerful nation which needs to learn how to talk to our allies, rivals, and enemies in ways in keeping with the emerging twenty first century world.

While his rivals may boast of having more years in the international and domestic political arena than Obama, what he offers is civic healing, a point echoed by powerful more politically experienced people who are endorsing him. The test for Obama is, if elected as President, if he can do what other inspiring Presidents have done when elected during times of national crisis, during times of societal disunity,  such as Abraham  Lincoln on the brink of the American Civil War, Franklin D. Roosevelt in the midst of the Great Depression, and John F. Kennedy in the heat of the Cold War, to have the gift of surrounding himself with an experienced brain trust  inner circle with implementation leadership gifts  to astutely carry out his vision .

This is why Obama is so popular, why such an unprecedented number of Americans in so many states are running to the polls to vote for him, why it is that not only the young and blacks are captured by his confidence that we can change, we can heal civically if we change ourselves but also members of  establishments of both political parties  speaking of his civic healing touch in their glowing  endorsements of him. It is not only members of American influential  political  families  such as the daughter of Democrat President John F. Kennedy or the grand daughter of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower but again, to  the amazement of the media, there are  hundreds of thousands if not millions of  Americans of much more humble backgrounds of all ancestries  in the urban and rural lands of America who have become disciples of the Obama symbolism of civic healing as an emerging cultural idea which will more than likely have a profound impact on American culture and politics no matter what happens at the political party conventions this summer or on national election day on the second Tuesday in November.

But, besides the present state of America which makes the emergence of a mass appeal leader with Obama’s qualities  so appealing, there is the man himself who personifies in amazing ways the complexities, paradoxes, and contradictions of American society and our need to repair old bridges and to build many new ones in our lives domestically and internationally. Obama has brought back into politics that which has been seen and more than that felt in the personal touch of  American Presidents such as Abraham Lincoln who is said to have the capacity to transform his  more politically experienced rivals when they met them one on one and to do the same to the  cynical  crowd   of people  which came  initially to make fun of this  awkward woods man from  then frontier of Illinois   say some thing and then could not stop clapping their hands once he finished some spell binding speech about civic commitment or about healing the nation in the brink of or in the midst of civil war.

In a highly complex and impersonal society in deep civic and international crisis,  having a President  who seems to be able to relate to the basic needs of people and to transform them  from self centered individuals into civically minded citizens  is a quality which Obama has which none of the other Democrat or Republican Party candidates have. Up until very recently at least, the more a cynical media has tried to capture Obama in a lapse of good judgment, they are dismayed by his authentic response which means that, for the most part,  what he says is how he lives, rather than what he says being only for public consumption with contrary private values. I should say as a quick digression that it was the same about Martin Luther King, Jr. His concern for people was genuine; he wanted no glory for himself. This is a man who wore the same clothes practically, who continued to live in a modest house as his fame increased, who drove a car so old that you could see the road on the driver’s side of where the floor used to be. And he gave his Noble Prize for Peace money to the movement.

An Iraqi soldier dead on guard

His mother

The extraordinary background of Obama makes him in a class alone when it comes to the history of blacks in American national mainstream politics in terms of demographic origins, personal background, and educational credentials. Keep in mind the phrase “ national mainstream politics” since though there have been African Americans involved in  national mainstream politics since the late 18th century, even those who have been taken seriously have for the most part been outsiders such as movement leaders or public intellectuals or politicians on the margins of their parties such as Jesse Jackson but do not have the influence to become a sustained serious candidate in the electoral process.

Obama’s mixed heritage, having an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas who raised her children in Hawaii and in Indonesia placed him in environments in which he had to become a bridger to survive, to achieve.  His extended family which in his own words looks like the United Nations, he learned early on how to  consider individuals as people with a broad range of personalities, abilities, and character rather than making presumptions based upon skin color. Growing up in such atypical environments as an African descent American citizen meant that he did not develop the phobias, the fears, the inferiority complex which too often operate to limit if not eliminate the social mobility of blacks, especially black males. His consequential ego strength and interpersonal skills  have allowed him to do things which blacks had never done before such as becoming the first Harvard Law Review editor, the first black male senator elected in the north, and now the first black to be taken seriously in presidential election politics. When you read his career history, what is striking is that though this is a man who wanted to go places and had the  historically white rather than black elite educational and vocational credentials as an attorney and as a state elected representative to do so, he made his name working for the marginalized and oppressed when he could have turned his back and joined some  majority white conventional establishment.

In  understanding Obama in this way, we need to bring his mother from the shadows of an emergent public life much and his own personal accounting on his search of his African father who left his mother during his early childhood. Obama’s inspirational message of change which has captured the imagination of so many people in the United States and around the world comes very much from   Stanley Ann Dunham Obama, his white mother from Kansas who was a remarkably transformed woman very much with a restorative justice consciousness. We are just beginning to learn more about Stanley Ann Obama since his published memoirs are more about his search for his African father than about his mother who actually raised him. Stanley Ann had him when she was a late adolescent University of Hawaii student. Stanley Ann  was an anthropologist years before she finally received her doctoral degree in that discipline from the University of Hawaii not long before she died at age  52 in 1995 in Jakarta, Indonesia where she was a Ford Foundation officer supporting efforts of community people to empower themselves. She raised her children both in Hawaii and in Indonesia, both highly pluralistic societies, to respect people as human beings. And Stanley Ann Obama also made sure that her son appreciated his African descent heritage while being open to other people. It is this perspective, that of his mother, which you hear in his speeches about change and unity and about civic empowerment. It was in the  household  of Stanley Ann  where  he learned how to take advantage of his privileged status to be of assistance to the oppressed and to the marginalized.

War plane Neureon

Changing mobility rules

There are some other emerging cultural changes in this election year which are becoming apparent and greatly symbolized by the public discourse around the astounding presence of Barak Obama in national politics. First, his support is coming significantly from younger Americans for another reason besides his unique gifts in reaching out to young people and addressing their civic needs and desires. Namely, many of his   white young supporters have grown up or wish they had grown up in integrated neighborhoods, classrooms, malls, cyberspace communities. Their musical and other cultural tastes, which include Rap and Hip Hop as well as My Space, supplements the fact that these  post-baby-boomers  have been accustomed  to  seeing powerful Black persons and other people of color in media images outside stereotypical roles such as only sports and entertainment. They are growing up in a society in which mobility is becoming highly unpredictable in terms of the ancestry of your physician in organized health care, the ancestry of the judge you appear before, the ancestry of the school teacher who will determine your grade and the same with the college professor, the priest of your parish who takes your confession or baptizes your child or you, medical school professor in your area of specialty, the ancestry of the President of the corporation  who can hire you or fire you or the person who interviews you for the  job, the ancestry of the police officer who gives you the traffic ticket.

Because it is bad public relations for business, people who make racial slurs, even while claiming they did not know any better, increasingly find themselves getting demoted, transferred, and fired from their jobs or positions. America  is no longer a society in other words in which racial categories neatly line up with who people are and what people do and you can get yourself in mobility trouble if you are not aware of that and say or do something even out of ignorance which is offensive  because of the person’s skin color. Again, in a country and in a world in which cultural pluralism is big business, which is one of the reasons why by the way Obama is the darling of so many corporations, expressing bigotry is not good for business these days in the States. Even though recent events have shown that racism is far from dead in America in all age ranges, it no longer has the public support in the leadership of key institutional sectors. The publicity and the lawsuits and the possibility of insulting people of color domestically and internationally with deep pockets of financial resources is bankrupting overt forms of racism and making persons with covert racist tendencies less and less effective in such a changing society and world.

As much as many younger Americans have adjusted to this kind of unpredictable world of not knowing  the ancestry of the person who can determine or derail your mobility, through developing intercultural lives, friendship circles, and other social circles, there are many who have not but wish to yet  can only do so with a new kind of national political leadership which for the first time in American history understands the need to deracialize as an every day practice and to engage civically around resolving common problems rather than remaining imprisoned in racialized boxes. There is now a need for political leadership which knows how to create the safe spaces—in communities, in educational institutions, in faith communities, in government agencies, and in media for people to not only discuss race but to talk through race as a laborious restorative justice process.  This is what made Obama’s historical speech on race so important since it was the first time an American leader in a presidential selection electoral process who is being taken seriously by such a large per centage of  voters spoke of the need for the nation to learn how to acknowledge and  talk through race  to destroy it  as a dysfunctional distract keeping Americans divided and thus unable to focus on resolving critical common problems.

 I am speaking of this matter from the experience of teaching for most of my thirty year career in major historically white research universities in the area of race and racism. Presently where I am at, Indiana University Bloomington, a huge  overwhelmingly white university with  40,000 students with only about 1500 black students, most of my students in my large African American studies courses  are white students from little towns around Indiana or from one of the major urban areas. What I hear from these students over the years is the confession  that they are ignorant, they just don’t know about racism, they just don’t know about the history of African Americans and other people of color but they realize if they are going to do well in life,  this deficiency  in their awareness must  be remedied. There are American university campuses on which I have been on and have heard about where it is white as well as non-white students who have petitioned their university administrations and faculties to increase the number of American born non-white faculty given the changing nature of the society and the world.  They astutely realize that if they are to have good careers and do well socially in the plural society and world in which they live, it is essential for them to have the opportunity to learn from culturally different professors. They realize that to be educated in homogenous environments in which the curriculum, degree requirements, faculty mentor opportunities do not include the experiences of non-whites then it is detrimental to their 21st century lives. And as a quick digressive note, don’t forget that in the restorative framework, race is a form of societal dehumanization which involves and includes every one; victims as well as perpetrators are one and the same. Therefore just as much as white youth, non-white youth are also acutely in need of having safe spaces created in places such as universities, workplaces, media, and faith communities to enable them as well as their white peers in developing genuine intercultural values and lives.

So, Obama’s generational appeal to younger Americans as well as to progressive minded older Americans  is a response to their sense of social rootlessness and to the outcomes of living in a society which though still has its daunting racial disparity problems is culturally becoming very much of a plural society in which living with culturally different people both residentially and virtually is becoming part and parcel of every day life.

Guantánamo Islamic prisoner

The decline of the traditional black establishment

There is still yet another cultural  change Obama’s presence symbolizes  which is in some senses generational when it comes to Americans younger than baby boomers but it is also a cohort impact among not a few Baby-boomers and older Americans. Obama greatly symbolizes shifts in Black identity formation and more than that, the break down of a dominant ideology of black identity which has been present in America since the end of the American Civil War in 1865. The African descent population since its colonial origins has always been greatly complex and diversified but like in the case of whites, the way in which racial privilege and racial oppression works in America as in the case of other multiracial societies is constructing myths of sameness. In the United States, the mythology has been two tiers: whites – blacks with increasing expansion of the grand narrative of races with the demographic growth of Asians and Hispanics in America and their increasing economic and political power. And we should not forget about the continued chronic marginalization and exclusion of indigenous people from mainstream American society and dominant culture.

Since the end of the American Civil War, the dominant homogeneous black identity caricature is that there is one black experience and it is rooted in southern slavery which transformed into a cotton sharecropping tenancy and into an urbanization process of economic exclusion and oppression called ghettos. Slavery, the cotton share cropping, and the big northern and southern urban ghettos created ecological spaces for the development and passing down of homogenous black culture.The litmus test of whether or not you were black is whether or not, according to this caricature, your life history fits into a slave, share cropping or ghetto framework  or  on rarer occasion, traced to  free black people. Being able to identify with the”black  language,”  “black religious beliefs,” “black  gender styles,” “black  music, “ “black values,” etc  these  idealized ecological contexts generated became over time part of the litmus test which was culturally owned by what  E. Franklin Frazier once called in the 1950s the Black bourgeoisie  or what I call  the traditional black establishment which emerged during the years after the American Civil War and may have gone through numerous generational transformations in other ways but continued to embrace the mentioned conception of who a black person is and is not.

This traditional black establishment  black  identity caricature, that every black person must come from a  house or field slave past or a rural southern share cropping or just poor background, or from the ghetto, is  also commonly believed by the media, the general public, and by academics. But, since the 1970s, it is a caricature which has been on the decline along with the black establishment which culturally owns it. And certainly the rise of Obama is symbolic of this erosion of national power, prestige, and influence of the black traditional leadership and  of its institutions such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the black college sector, black fraternal organizations,  and black printed media such as Ebony and black newspapers. There are several reasons for this decline of the traditional black leadership symbolized by the emergence of Barak Obama. I will briefly discuss two.

First, is the growing political and economic power of  recent waves of African immigrants as well as recent African descent immigrants from other parts of North and South America and world—but mostly the rising power of Africans. Ever since the United States liberalized immigration policies in the 1960s in regards to Africans, the U.S. has been experiencing a dramatic increase in the African immigrant population. In fact, the demographic increase of African immigrants in the U.S. is seen in that as of 2000, 20% of the most recent general black population increase is due to the immigration of Africans. Unlike previous waves of African descent immigrants, more recent waves prefer to develop their own power bases and maintain their homeland ethnic identities rather than assimilate into the historical black population. In many k-12 schools and in many college campuses, the black students who are the highest achievers are African and Caribbean immigrants or their descendents. In cities around the country, especially on the East coast, African immigrants are developing significant economic enterprises through their own ethnic community networks. They are developing their own faith communities separate from historical black populations. The fact that Islam is the fastest growing religion amongst African descent people in the United States can be in part attributed to the growth of the social and economic influence of African immigrants. Particularly since so many African immigrants prefer not to identify with the historical black population and at times are perceived as being used as tools of the dominant to disempower and to  disenfranchise historical black populations tracing their roots to the American slave regime  there is a great deal of tension between the traditional black establishment  and African immigrants. Certainly that resentment was displayed when Obama’s blackness was questioned by black establishment and media people since his life history as a son of an African and of a white mother from  Kansas who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia does not pass the minimal requirements for being a black person with stereotypically speaking with the slave and the ghetto roots. But, as we observed, given the growing marginality   of the traditional black leadership class in national politics, they could make Obama squirm and get defensive but did not have the political clout to stop him from becoming a viable candidate.

The inability of the traditional black establishment to mobilize against Obama says  much about their decline in power which is seen in other examples over the past twenty five years such as their failure  to block the appointment of black conservative Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court; to stop the rise of black conservative Ward Connerly who was instrumental in launching a successful anti-affirmative movement in California which became a national effort, and who have not been able to stop the trend of universities and businesses in counting African immigrants as blacks in affirmative action target populations. Black establishment leaders such as those of the NAACP and Vernon Jordan, the “best black friend” of then President Bill Clinton misread and even dismissed the possible appeal of Black Muslim leader Louis Farakahn’s extraordinarily successful and effective  One Million Black Men March. Others have condemned hip hop, black language movements, and the black under classes in general. While criticizing or turning up their noses in regards to the black poor and under classes, in similar veins as their white counterparts, many black establishment  leaders and citizens are experiencing a tremendous lack of cultural reproduction since their children and grandchildren are in many cases not producing a significant number of children; their children and grandchildren are not  performing well at all in school or in college; many of their children and grandchildren are  not  following a noticeable numbers of their parents or grandparents into the black ethnic family business , church, or  civic association or into black colleges. And last, since historically speaking  establishment black leaders in their various movements and organizations for racial justice  made the fatal mistake of not  developing alliances with Hispanics and Asians in past civil rights movements and in other justice areas, the black leadership establishment, indeed black people in general, are  becoming increasingly  marginalized and ineffectual in national, state, and local  politics as Hispanics and Asians continue to rise in economic and political power in the United States, especially since both Asian and Hispanic  populations have higher per centages of voters than blacks.

The second reason for the decline of the black establishment as symbolized by the rise of Obama is because he represents the post-baby boomer generation of African American who fall outside the black identity caricature. Like many other  African Americans born in the 1960s and especially afterwards, Obama did not attend segregated, inner city or rural majority black schools, he received his college education in elite white universities, worked his way up in majority white careers, and may even live in a majority white residential neighborhood. More than likely in other ways as an elite black male, like so many other African Americans of his status characteristics, he lives for the most part in a majority white world. Look at the demographic composition of his national campaign committee as a case in point. He did not grow up in a traditional black church, which would be to his detriment in some paradoxical ways I will briefly touch upon shortly.

The moderate to  conservative social views of these new kinds of African American middle and affluent classes (as defined in the tradition of Max Weber in terms of relative buying power in marketplaces) are no different than white middle classes about consumerism, welfare, crime control, affirmative action, and patriotism. Incidentally, about patriotism, it should now not come as a surprise to see that Obama, with all of his powerful vision of change expresses so much militaristic American patriotism when addressing foreign affairs views.

What is important to understand about these new middle class African Americans is that they do not necessarily reject being ethnically black, as seen in how much many of them embrace black ethnic holidays, most noticeably Kwanza which is an African  American invented African ritual celebrated during the  Christmas season. Many of them still belong to black fraternal orders, read black literature, drive to inner city black churches from their suburban homes, and even send their children to black colleges to find their blackness but they fall outside the traditional  caricature of black identity and are thus developing different kinds of black ethnic identities we social scientists have yet to study properly since we are embedded in terms of the traditional caricature of blackness. But, keep in mind that there are many young African Americans who do reject a black ethnic identity, especially biracial people with “white” and “black” parents or African Americans reared in culturally white households, who in the past would be labeled as black but now can choose what they are, especially when they have the economic resources such as golfer Tiger Wood who is of African American and Thai heritage, who, again to the horror of the black establishment, identifies himself as being something else besides black.

Survivors of hurricane Katrina

But still only human

Restorative justice as a way of life, a way to be, is of course a life long process. Obama’s journey down that road, paved by his mother and through his life experiences  as an elite American with seemingly a common touch is certainly much more sophisticated than many but like any one else,  he still has a long way to go.

One of the major challenges of  Obama is that some times, like in the cases of all politicians who are truly desirous of moving up the political ladder,  his ambition blinds him to such an extent that there becomes contradictions between what he says and how he lives.  One can shrug the shoulders and say, “so what, are we not all human?” Yes, that is true, but when a political leader is trying to convey a moral, higher road message, then he or she has to be much more careful that the values they publicly articulate are reflections of their private life. Otherwise, it is just a matter of time that some incident exposing the possible discrepancy between public views and private life will come to the light of day and the media will have a feast.

Certainly, this is what happened when it came to the controversy around the alleged racist remarks made by Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Obama’s church and a member of Obama’s campaign team. The entire incident  which though allowed, I should say, forced, Obama to have to give what became an unprecedented speech on race by a mainstream politician with a restorative justice ring, still revealed  Obama’s naiveté about black people  since he was not raised in a black community and may have worked in such communities but again, is not from a black community. His concern for being accepted by the black establishment rather than continuing to be who he is, resulted in him blundering in inviting his pastor to be a formal member of his national campaign committee.

He invited his pastor to join his committee realizing full well that his pastor had a history of saying things which could be read by the national media as being racist or just strange and odd. To assume that the media was  not waiting to bounce on him about him or a member of his campaign committee being militant or racist or just more than a bit strange, was to say the least, strangely naïve for  an otherwise brilliantly astute politician already viewed by many  as being the best campaigner America has seen in decades.

But it is a common mistake not a few contemporary blacks make who are well connected but not of or from the black community and therefore try to find ways of demonstrating that they are indeed black and have the backing of establishment blacks to prove it. In many cases, they end up being manipulated and used as in the case of Jeremiah Wright using the national exposure space Obama’s campaign gave him to push his personal ego centered agenda in spite of the consequences for Obama, consequences which Obama rose to the occasion brilliantly rose to respond to but with the cost of doing something to ignite insidious racist  fears  in  dominant American society and  culture about the tendency for even the most harmless appearing blacks to really be angry militants against white racism which can now be easily applied to him and used as excuses by many to be ambivalent or negative about supporting him as a serious  candidate for the American presidency.

Specifically, it is more than apparent that the Jeremiah Wright  incident indicates how little Obama understood the politics of the black church, the capacity of  powerful  pastors irrespective of ancestry, who view themselves as prophets and therefore not beholden to any human being to push their own ego centered agendas when the opportunity presents itself no matter how it harms others,  and cultural changes which include the diversification of black identities and it’s impact in national politics.

 Who knows why Obama  joined Rev. Jeremiah  Wright’s  church in Chicago which of course was his private choice,  but some suspect it had much to do with the fact that Wright is a political power house in Chicago and nationally. Wright was after all, the pastor who ordained Jesse Jackson. The flap about Wright is that this was a man who would over the pulpit from time to time make racially prejudiced comments and would weave conspiracy theories such as about HIV-AIDS epidemics in the black community. Obama finally acknowledged before and during his race speech hearing Wright saying such things over the pulpit but pointed out that like all persons of faith, he did not agree with every thing his pastor said. In his speech on race, he made it clear that he understood Wright’s perspective on race in America, a view he claimed to reject, to be a generational perspective which was now obsolete. He rejected the message but not the messenger. On the surface, this appeared to be a humane thing to say. There are others who have jumped to Wright’s defense noting that he was a prophet being concerned about the welfare of his flock in a long standing cultural tradition addressing the needs of a population long excluded,  marginalized, and mistreated by whites as if to say that made it ok for him to make racially prejudiced remarks and to weave conspiracy theories.

There are some who say that though Obama should be appreciative of Wright for leading him to Christ as an adult and for baptizing his children, when he became aware about Wright’s racial views years ago, as a person interested in being a genuine Christian he should have remembered what his restorative justice living non-church going mother taught him  and  left and joined  one of the many churches in Chicago though perhaps more modest than the social grandeur of Wright’s church with a pastor who does not express the social prejudices that he has spent a life time rejecting. Instead,  he chose to sit in the pews all these years, so his critics now claim,   and after his speech, as his critics more strongly claim, he is still sitting there in Wright’s church contradicting  what he claims he stand for as a life practice of openness. He may be surprised to find that if he had in his speech on race not only condemned the message of Wright and made it clear that he had made a mistake in even remaining a member of the congregation and would resign immediately, that there would be more people, than he assumes, including black people in and  increasing numbers outside of the pews of churches which stress genuine Christian love, who are searching for ways to live genuine, authentic lives  who would be supportive of him since it would be consistent with the values he claims are anchors of who he is. But, his personal  desire to become a traditionally defined  black person, with  the support of his black community grounded wife who boasts that she is the one who taught him how to be black,   life time   longing   to fit into a community in which in regards to skin color he is part of but in terms of cultural history he is not, has resulted in him stumbling into defending the behavior of a member of the declining black establishment which due to who he is, he should have condemned, confessed his error,   and moved on, consistent with the message of who he is and what America must become. And any one who assumes that what happened to Obama was inevitable, that there is some kind of public race speech every Black person eventually has to make to clear the air, rather than understanding how it is that Obama simply exercised poor judgment due to his private need to be accepted by a black political patron or perhaps even by the black father figure he never had, needs to look at other examples of the new generation of Black politicians emerging these days in majority white communities and states, such as Deval Patrick , Governor of the State of Massachusetts, who may ethnically identify as  black persons but who have the ego strength and interpersonal skills as bridgers who do not allow themselves to become the racialized pawns of blacks, whites, or others.

Yet, especially Wright’s showboating attack on Obama and Obama’s rather ineffectual reponse demonstrates how deep this Black father complex runs in the emotional being of Obama. News commentators accurately portrayed Wright as a very jealous man used to being the center of attraction being upstaged by one of his congregational members. It made no difference that the Obamas tithed $26,000.00 into his church and considered him to be a father figure. He still was envious at Obama and when he had the space to attack him, claiming to attempt to protect the Black church, he did so at the least opportune moment for Obama, at the National Press Club. For Obama to merely rebuke his pastor while remaining in his church or at least saying he was not against the Black church speaks volumes of the pain a son feels when rejected by his father. And more basic than that, it speaks of a man whose Achilles heel includes longing for an identity that he simply does not have and will continue to be taken advantage of until he accepts that fact of life. He is black in regards to partial ancestry derived from a father he did not even grow up around beyond age 3 and for the most part has the ethnic identity of an upper middle class white male.

Obama’s waffling on the question of  Wright and his membership in Wright’s church gave his opponets enough time between  Super Tuesday in February and the Pennsylvania primary in late April and the Indiana and North Carolina primary in early May to transform the issue into a character flaw problem feeding into traditional racial stereotyping about Black men not being trustworthy and being unpatriotic (the Ayers association issue).  The fact that the polls showed after the Indiana/North Carolina Primaries that the Wright incident had no noticeable impact on Obama is indicative again of the great cultural sea change occurring under radar of a media with  baby-boomer and older journalists who still think traditionally about race.

What ironically hurt Obama more than the Wright incident in the long run is his urban elitism and anti-evangelism attitude. It is in keeping with his social upbringing in an atheistic home combined with his elite urban education at Occidental  College, Columbia University, and Harvard University that such an attitude would be a logical outcome of a value held by people like him. But, in this day and age with such a powerful evangelical movement, especially in small towns thought out the Midwest and in other areas of the country, making such public comments as a candidate for the U.S. Presidency was to say the least, foolish. The foolishness of his urban elitist crack on Midwestern small town religiousity added salt to the wound of his continued struggle to attract the support of white blue collar workers. It speaks of an ironic flaw when we consider the race history of the United States. Here an African American who as a member of the Ivy League elite in America who has the nerve to so openly snub an overly white rural region of the country. But, considering the importance of Midwestern states in presidential elections these days, it was a gaffe which just gives prejudiced whites and an out of touch traditionally racial media just another  opportunity to vote against him and to raise character questions and questions of readiness for the American Presidency.

But we human beings, we all have our limitations; we are all not there fully yet in disentangling ourselves from our egos, ambitions, and agendas. What matters, is that the emergence of the Obama Phenomenon with all its promises and limitations at least  symbolizes without perhaps  changing the course of race and racism in America very much in the long run,  the possibilities of a journey of we Americans coming back and embracing each other again and in brand new ways. At best The Obama Phenomenon is a symbolic  catalyst for what America shall increasingly become as a long hard road ahead with stunningly wonderful possibilities  of authentic cultural inclusion, it is a micro-revolutionary paradigm historically excluded or marginalized in American society and dominant culture since the colonial era which is now finally beginning to worm  its way into the very core of who we are and who we must become as a plural people in a plural society and in a plural world. We shall see what happens.

The Brazilian fascination with Obama

The man at the street fruit stand could hardly speak English. But, when he heard my American accent, he said “Obama!” and gave me two slices of melon for the price of one. The The Brazilian fascination with Obama is incredible for a number of reasons. My English speaking taxi driver took me to a snack bar to buy some roasted chicken and when I was introduced to the owner as being American, he said, “Obama, No more Bush.” And he continues to say only that when I go back to buy more chicken.   The daily newspapers and television news reports are filled with news about Obama. I have spoken about the Obama Phenomenon in  Rio de Janiero, Sao Paulo, Salvador Londrina, and will be going to Recife soon. Every where I go to speak, there are good sized audiences; people curious not only about Obama, but how Obama relates to Brazil.

Brazilians are fascinated with Obama for a number of reasons. First, Brazil is really demographically very much of an African descent nation-state, especially when you consider that though the country is officially 48% Afro-Brazilian, the per centage is much higher more than likely when you  realize the large number of white skinned and brown skinned Brazilians who have African descent ancestry but still self define themselves as being white (very similar to whites in the United States of course and the growing number of biracial Americans who define themselves as being white or Latino or Arab).In this respect, Obama is a catalyst for the increasing black identity one sees in the country not only among black and brown skinned Brazilians but also white skinned Brazilians who are beginning to connect to the total cultural diversity of their multiple ancestry. More than this, Obama is a projected mirror for what will eventually happen in Brazil. As more and more Afro-Brazilians climb national political and other elite social systems, it will be just a matter of time before the country will have a dark skinned  Afro-Brazilian President.

Second, as a nation state, Brazil is in search of an identity which is distinctive from Europe and from other areas of the Western Hemisphere, which is a unique plural society composed of  the mixture of European, African, and native Indian peoples  along with a historical Asian (largely Japanese) population which is finally beginning to search for their own ethnic identity and their place in the nation-state. This is a long time coming search for unique national  identity in a world in which identifying with Europe or even with America is not as fashionable or as wise as it used to be during the long era of European imperialism and  American Cold War dominance and traditional American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Brazilians may want European and American cultural commodities but who they are as a plural people uniquely historically made into a nation  is a totally different story. Perhaps that is why there is so much resistance to learning English here and the learning of French seems to continue to be only relevance amongst the academic elite. And, most ironically, the resistance of many Brazilians to learning Spanish in a Latin America dominated by Spanish speakers is probably the strongest linguistic indicator of Brazilian determination to be uniquely Brazil. Certainly the emergence of Obama in many respects reflects the development of a new kind of plural American identity. The kind of  emerging America I have described in this essay in some respects appears to be very much the kind of society Brazilians like to claim to have but it is more than apparent to many it is not as seen in the emerging affirmative action debates and the  civil rights claims of the Afro-Brazilian movement. In this sense, the Obama Phenomenon is reminding Brazilians that contrary to what their national ideology claims, they have deep racial problems in their society preventing dark skinned citizens from succeeding at such levels. It will be a long struggle but again, Obama symbolizes that one day as more and more dark skinned citizens appear in  the public spheres of the media, politics, higher education, business, science and technology, the eventual election of a black skinned President will symbolize that their public ideology of  racial democracy will finally begin to match  the rehumanization of their nation-state as indicated in the respectful way Afro-Brazilians are treated as human beings.

Third, as alluded to earlier, the heavily non-white demographics of Brazil and the search for a unique cultural national identity has become a controversial public issue through the recent national policies promoting affirmative action for Afro-Brazilians in public schools and in public and private universities. Very similar to how the Brown court  decision and the civil rights laws in the United States over 50 years ago began to create public discussions and controversies  about racial inequality and racial equality in the national public sphere for the first time since the ending of the American  Civil  War and Reconstruction, Brazilians are beginning to enter the same phase.

The problem is there is a scarcity of academic, legal, and even political expertise on how to discuss race publicly as well as how to dismantle racism as public policy and every day life issues. This scarcity of expertise stems from  a nation state with system leaders and elites long comfortable in the presumption that race is not a problem in society, maybe economic class, but not race. Perhaps  it is for this reason why it has been proving to be useful for  a  American social scientist who is an expert on American cultural and social history and on American society in comparative perspective   to come to  Brazil  to speak to public audiences on and off campuses to compare and contrast deep cultural and social changes occurring in the United States which compare and contrast with Brazil in the complex area of race and effective methods to dismantle racism.  I have found  discussing Obama's civic unity message and the fact that he has a unique African descent identity  as a mainstream American politician is proving to be an effective way to address deep cultural and social changes in both nations in some very fascinating and important ways demonstrating the long road which can be paved in destroying racism as a form of dehumanization.

Beggar in São Paulo street

Below is a May 30, 2008 interview I had with a Grupoestado reporter about the presence of Obama in American electoral politics. I am reprinting the  questions and  the answers here as a my conclusion since the interview is so representative of the questions I get asked by the Brazilian press no matter where in the country I am interviewed. The nature of the questions certainly reflect a continued amazement on the part of the Brazilian media that a Black person could be so seriously considered to become U.S. President which of course is a reflection of assumptions about the abilities of black people in their own society which still tend to be so invisible in social status and in mobility. My responses are actually attempts to educate Brazilian publics about what race is as a dehumanizing societal experience which is changing in an America which still has its serious racial disparity problems in daily quality of life but is nonetheless has begun to radically change over the past ninety years, especially the last fifty years. If America can change in this way, certainly Brazil can too is my subtle message.

1 (Reporter) . Are USA prepared to have an African-American president? What would the victory of Senator Obama represent to African-American society and for white American society?

(Stanfield) First of all, please do not get me wrong. As tragic as it has been for all Americans historically, our country as a diversified society was developed through the dehumanizing practice of race.  And certainly there are still many unfortunate quality of life disparities between whites and non-whites in areas such as education, employment, incarceration, and health status. Nonetheless, we are all Americans irrespective of our ancestry or how it is that we are natives with ancestors who were already here when the Europeans arrived or voluntary or involuntary  immigrants who came to this  country and contributed to the great nation we have become.The emergence of Senator Barak Obama and his extraordinary accomplishments in the Presidential selection  electoral process, says much about how far America is coming as a nation-state in which Americans are more concerned with the character, vision, and the ability to inspire  civic healing  both at home and abroad than racialized ancestry. This is not to say that racial prejudice is dead in America and that there are therefore no more whites or non-whites who are segregationists and in other ways are racists. But, the emergence and the elect ability potential of Obama demonstrates the increasing cultural outcomes of a desegregating society in which citizens are more concerned about the ability of a President to lead well in an America experiencing serious civic and economic crises and a challenging twenty first century world than the stereotypical and I dare say, dehumanizing presumptions about the social meanings attached to  a person’s skin color.

2. (Reporter) Do you think racism is still an important question in this campaign? How it appeared until now? How does racism can threat Obama's election in November?

(Stanfield) Until we get rid of the dehumanizing affects of race on all Americans, this false  and absurd though dangerous presumption that you can predict the character or the abilities of a person by the color of their skin, racism will continue to be an important issue every where in America.  Again, we have changed greatly as a society when it comes to getting away from race as a way of thinking and living in the United States, especially among those Americans under 40 who have been the greatest beneficiaries of desegregation and of a world in which increasing global power is in the hands of non-white regions, leaders, and nations. But, certainly there are traditional racial stereotypes which are still quite active in American dominant culture, including in our political systems and electoral processes. One of those stereotypes is that Black males have no character worthy of trust. Another racial stereotype is that Black people are not patriotic since we are not “true Americans,” in the eyes of  prejudiced whites and even non-whites who fail to realize or respect that since the beginning of the nation, Black citizens have given their lives for our country. That is why I believe the media attempted to turn Obama’s initial support of his pastor by condemning the message but not the messenger, which he changed after his pastor attacked him, created for a time, an opportunity to question his character and it is why the right wing continues to raise questions about his patriotism and about his surname which sounds Muslim. Their efforts are coded  racial phrases which could be picked up by people, irrespective of their ancestry incidentally, who harbor racial prejudices against Blacks, more particularly against black males who even among blacks are viewed in such negative was as having no character and not being loyal to any one including family and nation.

3. (Reporter) Some people said that Senator Barack Obama can not be considered a real African-America, since he does not have slave ancestors. What do you think of that?

(Stanfield) Many blacks with deep historical backgrounds in the United States as free people and as slaves as well as whites embrace stereotypes about black identity which have been popular since the ending of the American Civil War in 1865. These stereotypes, which have never been totally true and are becoming even more so untrue in recent decades, presume black identity comes from growing up in a black ghetto or in a black rural environment and is centered in participating in a  black cultural things such as so called black language, black music, black church,  black schools, black civic associations, and marrying a black spouse.  Obama had an African immigrant father who left his household in early childhood. His white mother from Kansas raised him in Hawaii and in Indonesia. He attended elite predominantly white universities not elite predominantly  black universities. In these and in other ways, to some in the media and in both white and black establishments, he does not fit the traditional meaning of being black in America. But, this is a very naïve and rather racist assumption that all blacks have to come from the same origins to be black people. Obama symbolizes a diversity in black identity which is becoming more and more commonplace in the post-1960s for two reasons. First, since the 1970s, African immigration has significantly contributed to the black ethnic variation in the United States, which at the same time is causing deepening tensions between the historical black leadership still holding on to traditional black identity definitions and to emerging black leaders in politics, education, media, and business who have at least one parent or grandparent  who is an African immigrant. Second, since the 1970s as well as a consequence of the civil rights movements and policies developing a desegregating society, there are a growing number of blacks who do not grow up in and have no experiences living in predominantly black communities and they attend historically white schools and universities and work in integrated places of employment. Some of these  blacks identify themselves as being black such as Obama and others such as golfer Tiger Wood do not identify themselves as being black.

4. (Reporter) Do you think Mr. Obama, if he wins the elections in November, can frustrate in any way the black movement? How can Senator Obama deal with the pressing of radical black movement? What do you think about Rev. Jeremiah Wright case?

(Stanfield) Since colonial times, like in the case of whites and other non-white populations such as Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, the political views of blacks about issues such as the U.S. Presidency has been very complex and in not a few cases quite paradoxical. As it has been historically, today, there  are numerous black movements going on in the United States across the political spectrum from radical to liberal to moderate to  conservative to right wing. Thus, black movement perspectives on an Obama presidency will depend upon where a person is on the political spectrum. I am sure those on the left side of the spectrum will be delighted to finally have a president who understands the daunting domestic quality of life poor Americans are facing and who is willing to be an international leader who is willing to listen and to work positively with other nations. Those on the right of the spectrum will be relieved that though he will probably be a humanitarian domestically and abroad, he is a strong family values political leader at home who believes in a strong military presence internationally.  President Barak Obama can best contend with the political as well as the ethnic and class diversity of the black population the same way he deals with everything else in keeping with his civic unity message  which promises to re-institute the deep level of respect we Americans must discover or rediscover we have for each other in this time of great civic disarrayness and demoralization. Namely, if he is to be an effective President for all Americans, he must  keep his  door open for genuine dialogue ,negotiation, and if need be conflict transformation  with interest groups domestically and internationally, especially those who have been long ignored and devalued.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright case represents what happens when a political candidate with a civic unity message does not apply what he or she says publicly to his or her private life. No matter the personal reasons why Obama, who otherwise is such a brilliant campaign strategist would so badly blunder by putting his pastor on his national campaign committee, once Rev. Wright made his first negative remarks in a national public forum, Obama should have not only condemned the message but resigned from Wright’s church immediately with a public apology for even staying in the man’s church . Since Obama condemned  Wright’s message in his Toward a Perfect Union without resigning from the church, it created  room for his adversaries to question his character and ironically, it also gave space for Wright to showboat at his expense.  This incident demonstrates Obama’s major personal weakness which can be exploited and used against him publicly, namely his deep need to be a traditional black person which he is not and which will continue to get him in trouble. From the very beginning he should have been stressing how he is an example  of the great ethnic identity diversity of Americans rather than fitting into a narrow black identity box which he is not and which so many African Americans are not---which is why once he condemned Wright after his pastor attacked him, the polls found that most Americans agreed with his response and it has not in the long run politically damaged him as much as the media predicted. Obama needs to be Obama and no one else and when he is who he is, he will continue to soar.

5. (Reporter) What do you think of Senator Obama's famous 'A More Perfect Union' speech? How does it changed the American view of race? 

(Stanfield) The speech is a capstone of  Obama’s  unprecedented restorative justice paradigm in Presidential seeking  politics by a mainstream American politician which is basic to his civic healing worldview which so many Americans and people around the world find so refreshing and in a profound way, soothing. He is the first mainstream American politician who has a serious shot at the Presidency advancing the view that race  is a dehumanizing experience in which we are all both perpetrators and victims. Thus we Americans need to talk through and destroy  race so we can rehumanize in ways which will allows us to over come this horrible stumbling block to civic unity  imperative for resolving the serious public good problems which negatively affect all of us and other members of the global community of nations.

6.(Reporter) How could Barack Obama conquer so many supporters among the white community?

(Stanfield) Ever since the ending of World War I in 1918, widely accepted   racial segregation, Jim Crow that is, in policy and in attitudes has been eroding. Certainly the decline of Jim Crow was accelerated by civil rights executive orders, policies and movements during the late 1940s and especially the 1950s and 1960s. Consequential desegregation over the last sixty or so years has profoundly transformed the cultural values and attitudes of whites towards blacks through residing in integrating neighborhoods, sitting in the same airports and classrooms, listening to the same music and attending the same sporting events and seeing powerful blacks in the media and in national politics, healthcare, law, business, the armed forces, education, and religion (such as major historical denominations apologizing for participating in slavery). There is still much transformation in white cultural attitudes and values about blacks  which needs to be done, especially in predominantly white rural areas all over the country. But, certainly Obama’s popularity among young white  Americans, well educated white Americans, members of white  influential American families and business persons, and increasingly even  among working class whites demonstrates how far we have come and are going. The historical numbers of white Americans going to primary state polling booths to vote for Obama  indicates most fundamentally  how much we Americans  irrespective of ancestry  are so desperate for an inspirational leader,  civic healer during our time of deep civic crisis with declining global prestige. Keep in mind as well that Obama is popular among corporations since post-1970s big business has discovered that there is much profit in culturally diverse consumer markets and that their businesses decision-making is much more effective when there are different cultural perspectives around the table. It is the reason why making negative racial remarks among those leading systems in the United States is frowned upon so much, especially in a society in which litigation against discrimination as well being publicly embarrassed are problems business and other systems leaders prefer to avoid. This changing culture, which goes the need to learn how to be intercultural beyond being cosmetically politically correct is a coping skill younger Americans with mobility aspirations realize they need in a society lead increasingly by baby boomers who just don’t get it due to their own ambivalent feelings about race. As a new generation leader speaking  about civic unity and towards a perfect union younger Americans and progressive older Americans  I believe are excited about Obama since he would become the first American President who understands the need for national and more local spaces for young people  to learn how to become more personally and civically open citizens if they are to live effective lives in a plural society and world.

 What are the differences between Obama and other African-American candidates, like Rev. Jesse Jackson?

 Ever since colonial times, black Americans have been involved in national politics but  as outsiders such as civil rights movement leaders such as Frederick Douglass,   William E. B. DuBois,  Fannie Lou Hammer, Whitney Young, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X,   or Louis  Farrakhan or  educators such as  Booker T. Washington, John Hope, or Mary Bethune. Or in more recent times, such as in the case of Barbara Jordan in the 1970s  or Jesse Jackson  or Alan Keyes in the post-1970s, national black politicians have been prominent yet marginal to their parties in terms of ability to win national elections. Obama is the first  black to be a serious contender in the U.S. Presidency  electoral process who stands a good chance to get nominated by his or her party and to actually end up in the White House There is some speculation that Jesse Jackson is unusually quiet so he will not ruin Obama’s chances in the Presidential electoral process. There may be some truth to that but the fact of the matter is, Obama has transformed the paradigm of race and politics to such an extent, I do not think it really matters what Jesse Jackson and other national black leaders say or do since  their race leader  style of politics have become in the course of the past two decades ineffectual and in other ways not taken seriously, even by many if not most blacks (consider as another example, the declining influence of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). If  Jesse Jackson and other so blacks who view themselves as national race leaders  try anything negative, which I doubt,  it will be read, like in the case of Jeremiah Wright as being jealousy and sour grapes which will not have long term affects on Obama as long as he acts like a civic unity candidate who no longer has to play traditional race leader card games.

7. (Reporter) What are the similarities and differences between Mr. Obama and other African-American political personalities, such as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell?

(Stanfield) Like Colin Powell and Condolezza Rice and I should add Devall Patrick (the black Governor of Massachusetts) he  is representative of a post-1970s new, emerging black leadership  of both major parties  not just dependent upon black constituencies to get national political appointments such as to Presidential cabinets or to the federal judiciary or military or to win federal and statewide elections. He is, on the national level, also representative of blacks who are being appointed to lead  nation-wide and global systems in business, education, media, and non-profit organizations  independent of the approval of black establishment leaders and constituencies.  Even if Senator Obama does not become the Democratic Party candidate or does and does not defeat Senator   McCain  in the November Presidential election, he certainly has been a pioneer, a catalyst really, for another non-white person to vie more successfully for the U.S. Presidency in the not too distant future. That contention is made more plausible when we consider both the growing success of blacks and other non-whites in leading systems and gaining highly visible national government appointments and the fact that demographically, America will be a non-white nation-state by the year 2050 which is really not very long from now.

8.(Reporter) Do you think Senator Obama should take a white vice-president candidate to help him to get supporters among the white community?

(Stanfield) Obama will need to select a running mate from the American Midwest since it is that region in which Presidential elections have been won or lost in recent years. And yes, it is true that his weakest link with working class whites in the Midwest and in the East, so who ever he selects will have to help him reach out to that population effectively. It will also be necessary for Senator  Hillary Clinton to aggressively campaign for him especially in the Midwest and in the East to attract   white women and white working class male  voters and to help him gain the endorsements of Latinos in  Texas, California, and in Florida. But with all this said, keep in mind that in either one or both times Bill Clinton ran for the U.S. Presidency, he won without getting a majority of the white working class vote. The major two voting blocks he has to worry the most about is white women and Latinos with the hope that too many working class white male Democrats will not either sit at home or vote for McCain( the increasing union endorsements  for Obama will greatly assist him in attracting white working class male and female votes). In fact, the demographics of the voters who elected Bill  Clinton to the White House look very much like those of the voters supporting Obama. Hillary’s role would have to one of party  healing and unity which is necessary to not only reach out to constituencies for Obama  but to help to solidify the Democrats against the Republicans which has become polarized during the primary season.

Can Obama win in the white States? Obama has already won in majority white states such as Iowa and Idaho  and has not done so badly in the bigger states such as California,Indiana, and Pennsylvania in which he came in a close second.

9. (Reporter) What are the similarities and differences between Mr. Obama and other African-American historical leaders, in particular with Rev. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X?— (Stanfield) SEE QUESTION 6 RESPONSE

10. (Reporter) Many people have insinuated that candidate Barack Obama could be assassinated by racists during the campaign or after winning the Presidency. Do you think it is possible? What would the political and social consequences?

(Stanfield) This is thinking stemming from what has happened to progressive black leaders in the past, dating back to the beginning of the nation. Thus, it is a fear which stems from a conventional way of thinking about race and politics whites and non-whites have long been reared in which I do not think matches very well in contemporary times.  This fear  is embraced unfortunately by a  large number of blacks who have not been mobility oriented into the contemporary elite circles of American society  and by certain media people who  have traditional fears of what happens to successful black people. It is also a paranoia resulting from living in a nation state with a media which has not done a good job at all in educating publics about the  accomplishments  of blacks though very few, but who are successfully leading desegregated systems of national and of global  influence. Many of these system leaders know who they are ethnically and are not fearful of being change agents and even making it clear that they are black people and proud of it rather than selling out or being fearful of repercussions if they speak out against racism. It is a matter of the skill they have learned to play the multiethnic game on their way up career ladders in a desegregating society and world. Such will be the same for Obama. Besides a few missteps, which are bound to happen, he seems to know how to navigate well through elite desegregating systems both nationally and internationally. And he does so, we should remember, as a reformist insider, not as a revolutionary outsider to the relief of those powerful persons who understand that America is in serious need of civic and global repair, ideally in their eyes, by some one who in many respects is one of them.

I think this election year is going to either self-correct a great deal of damage which has been done to our two party system over the past two or more decades or could destabilize our democracy in some very disturbing and even scary ways. If anything occurs which seriously  disrupts this cultural attempt for American society to shall we say, correct itself to moderate reformist political culture which is the norm, it could make us vulnerable to the mobilization of a right wing party which could win the White House and in other ways, move the country further over the right. So we can only hope and pray that Senator Clinton will cooperate with  Senator Obama to restablize the Democratic Party through strongly endorsing him and aggressively campaign on his behalf  rather than potentially destroy it by taking her fight to the convention or sitting on the sidelines when he is nominated and that nothing tragic happens to either Obama or McCain as candidates or as the Senator who becomes President during the second Tuesday election in November.

John H. Stanfield, II, PUC-RIO Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American Studies. Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Sociology, Indiana University Bloomington

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