Ein Text aus dem englischen Angebot von MUT: Barack Obama's inauguration as president of the USA is being hailed as the dawn of a new era in his country. He has already secured his place in the history books as the USA's first Black president, and in the record books as the politician to receive the most petitions, open letters, public advice and declarations of good will even before he took up office. Leaving aside the prophecies and predictions, MUT correspondent Karen Margolis considers what Obama means for minorities, the fight against racism, and open democracy.

MOCA OBAMA. The sign outside a café off the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on the French Riviera has been offering this coffee special for the past month. It's one of the millions of big and small gestures all over the world to salute Barack Obama as 44th president of the USA. The sign brings a smile to the faces of passers-by, from winter tourists and business people in suits to young men and women from Nice's big North African population. The general mood seems to be: Think Obama, think positive.

It's more than just wishful thinking. The first decade of the 21st century has been dominated worldwide by the climate of fear and aggression summed up in US policy doctrines like "war on terror" and "shock and awe". The enthusiasm that led millions of US citizens to vote for Obama was based on his promise of change. It was a message the USA and the world was waiting for. During the election campaign, Obama's appearance at the Victory Monument in Berlin in July 2008 drew a crowd of almost 200,000 people. It was a cleverly staged event to evoke memories of former US presidents: Kennedy's famous visit to divided Berlin in the Cold War of the 1960s, and Ronald Reagan's speech in 1987 when he demanded the Berlin Wall be torn down. Yet it was also a message that Obama wanted to heal the breach between many European countries and the USA caused by the war in Iraq, and forge new transatlantic relationships.

Obama was born in 1961 only nine days before the Berlin Wall was erected. He grew up during the Cold War amid the race riots of his own country. He was speaking with a conscious sense of history when he introduced himself to the Berlin crowd as a proud US citizen and a "fellow citizen of the world". He went on to say, "The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."

Fine words. Many politicians have uttered such noble sentiments in the past, and cynics can be excused for pointing out the pitfalls between rhetoric and action. Why should we believe this time around?

The answer is that we don't have to believe. We don't have to wait for Obama's first speeches and decisions. We just have to look around for ourselves to see that his election as president has already set a wave in motion the world over — a wave that could bring real change if we take the chance.

Mix and Mutt

The most obvious change, and the one that has attracted the most attention so far, is that Obama is the first Western leader with a dark skin. This is rightly seen as a fulfilment of the USA's constitutional promise that any US-born citizen, whatever his creed, colour or origins, can rise to the highest position in the country. Five days before his inauguration, Obama's image was installed at Madame Tussaud's waxworks in Berlin beside German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicholas Sarkozy. Obama stands out immediately in this company as the outsider, a potent comment on the white European Christian culture that dominated large parts of the world for so long. Even as a waxwork, the wakeful eyes, the determined jaw, the aura of concentrated hope that surrounds him seem to defy the ugly spirits of the past hovering around the controversial effigy of Hitler at Madame Tussauds Berlin.

Obama, the upcoming man of the 21st century, stands for many things fascism wanted to destroy. His Kenyan-American roots have made him an icon of racial equality. The day after his election in November 2008, my friend Marina, who actively supported his campaign, mailed me jubilantly from New York:

"In my childhood, he and I could not have drunk from the same water fountain and now he is MY PRESIDENT. My generation and I aren't just Moses, never making it over the border; we are all Joshua today!!
"I wish my parents could have seen this, but I know they believed it would come."

Marina had special reason to rejoice in Obama's election. She grew up in the 1940s in Atlanta, the capital of Georgia, one of the last states in the southern USA to abolish slavery. In the world of Marina's childhood, Black people, even the heroic Black soldiers returned from Europe after conquering the Nazis and fascism, were second-class citizens. There were still living eyewitnesses to the infamous Atlanta race riots of 1906, when at least 27 died and over 70 were injured, while Jewish groups speaking out against segregation were violently attacked by white supremacists. In the 1940s and '50s America's most notorious white racist group, the Ku Klux Klan, attempted a revival in Georgia that lasted well into the 1980s.

Times have changed since the little girl Marina drank from fountains whose water was banned for Black people. Today Atlanta proudly celebrates its links with the 1960s US civil rights movement. The city claims Martin Luther King, born there in 1929, as its most famous resident. In the '60s King championed the local battle for racial equality. Among the actions he supported was the black Atlantan students' "Appeal for Human Rights", which condemned segregation and argued for direct action. The ensuing waves of sit-ins and demonstrations had their effect: Atlanta's mayor became one of the few Southern white mayors to support desegregation of state schools — and non-violent direct action became the weapon of future generations of civil and human rights activists.

In this respect, Obama represents not the beginning but the culmination of a process that began in the previous generation. Commentators have been quick to identify him with great Black leaders of the 20th century. The inauguration poem West Indian literature Nobel laureate Derek Walcott wrote for Obama, while expressing the scepticism of a poet for politics, places the new president on the path of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Obama himself is aware that being claimed by one group could be divisive. He carefully keeps his balance on the line between races, creeds and nationalities. Whereas King had a prophetic dream, Obama is a judicious mixture of optimism and reality, building a modern myth of the sober, responsible man at the top refusing to be seduced by power or dazzled by the limelight, tough on corruption and sympathetic to human and environmental issues.

In one of his early post-election press conferences Obama used a human-interest item to slip in a self-definition that has become significant. Talking about getting a dog for his daughter, he said the family had thought about getting "a mutt — like me." By referring explicitly to his mixed racial origins Obama lined himself up in a special category with the mongrels of the world, the traditionally despised who have never really belonged anywhere. He is giving a badge of pride to an increasingly large group of people with hybrid origins, a group growing all the time because of global mobility, migration from south to north and relaxation of religious and social codes (at least in the West). The term "mixed marriage" no longer has the sinister implications it did in Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. Obama the Kenyan-American, the US president able to joke about his origins, is cutting through hypocrisy and knee-jerk political correctness, making it possible to talk more easily about race and ethnicity. If Europe takes its cue and tries this kind of approach to integrating migrants and people of mixed origin, coming generations could see German chancellors of Turkish origin and British prime ministers with Indian, Pakistani or West Indian roots. People have nothing to lose but their prejudices.

Meritocracy and Open Communication

Obama represents another striking characteristic of US society: its capacity to integrate immigrants and ethnic minorities and give them a chance to prove themselves. The idea of the USA as a meritocracy, a society that allowed people with energy and talent to reach the top, came into vogue around the time Obama was born. Young Barack, an assiduous student, quickly showed the kind of merit that assured his entry to the elite. An expatriate American friend of mine in Berlin commented recently:

"I realized at some point I was just seeing him as a white guy with a dark complexion. I don't know why exactly. Perhaps because of the way he moves and speaks, his elegant clothes, the fact that his mother is white. I mean, this isn't in-your-face Spike Lee. I think this made him acceptable to many white voters. It is an interesting irony that the first 'black' president is half white. It's almost as if we need a transition. (By extension, we might have to have a transvestite or some other gender hybrid in the White House before the first woman can become president.)"

Obama's easy familiarity with the corridors of power certainly won over many white voters, along with the black and other minority groups longing for a new kind of leader to usher in a new era of 21st century politics. The man who began his political career 20 years ago as a community organiser has grown to become a self-assured leader who doesn't beg for his birthright. He's a man who looks equally good in jogging pants and sneakers or an Armani suit. A man who has won the respect of his peers. To match the illustrious company he'll be keeping at international summits and waxwork shows, at his cabinet table in the White House Obama is surrounding himself with distinguished graduates from the world's top universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, London School of Economics…

Yet there's a difference here to the way Western leaders habitually surround themselves with expert committees and advisory boards. At the same time as recognizing the need for the best expert advice, Obama gives the impression of being willing to listen to ordinary voices. His early experience as a community worker taught him the power of local organisation. The vast and deeply committed grassroots network he built up during his campaign for the presidency is still there, willing and able to be active. His website with its print versions of his speeches gets millions of hits daily (see http://www.barackobama.com). Without being a demagogue, he appears as a man who can hold listeners spellbound and make them believe in their own ability to change things. He is trying to be a man of the people without catering to popular stupidity and prejudice. His regular speeches as president-elect have striven to reassure his country that he can handle its massive economic crisis, that he understands the everyday worries and fears of "the person on Main Street, not just the one on Wall Street."

The result of this open acknowledgment of ordinary and disadvantaged people means that, more than any previous world leader, since his election he has been flooded with petitions, open letters, blog appeals, pop and rock songs, raps, poems and other messages. Some of the world's greatest and most famous scholars, spokesmen and media figures have felt moved to write to him. Stars like Bono and Bruce Springsteen, whose politics is as famous as their music, will play the concert after his inauguration.

To mark Obama's inauguration, BBC radio invited several authors and poets to write to the new president. Aside from the poem by Derek Walcott mentioned above, Israeli novelist David Grossman took up the invitation as one of six Israeli writers with a joint appeal to the new US president. Grossman began by mentioning Obama had told him he had read his book about the Holocaust, and went on to say: "For generations things are regarded as impossible. Then, when they happen, the whole of reality organizes itself around them." He was speaking as much about the Middle East as about Obama's rise to power. Lamenting the dead on both sides in the Gaza war, Grossman urged Obama to act on his words, quoting the great French writer Albert Camus, apostle of the dispossessed and humiliated: "The passage from speech to moral action has a name: to become human."

It doesn't matter that Obama won't have time to read all the pleas and advice. What's important is that an international public dialogue has opened up, inspired by Obama as a quasi-mythical addressee. It offers a chance for people who can't reach their own governments or centres of power to take their concerns to the wider world. Obama has become a focus for dammed-up hopes that people have been nursing and longing to express. Maybe we citizens of other countries should start asking how we can create a similar climate at home. Far more people in our societies would speak out against racism and injustice they are seeing or suffering if they felt they had a chance of being heard and getting support from other people involved in open dialogue.

The Guantanamo Message and the Mass Media

In terms of human rights, one of the key promises Obama has made is to shut down the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Set up in 2001 as part of President Bush's "war on terror" in reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA, for the past eight years it has been a shameful chapter in human rights worldwide. Aside from the US's allies in the war against terror, Germany, Czechoslovakia and other European countries are known to have been secretly involved in the capture (sometimes kidnapping) and interrogation of suspected terrorists who landed up in Guantanamo. The name has come to symbolize wilful persecution and incarceration of Muslims, inhuman treatment including torture and psychological terror, and deprivation of legal representation and other civil rights. In 2007 the Pentagon even censored a book of poems by Guantanamo prisoners on the grounds that "poetry can be a risk to national security".

Obama's early announcement to shut down Guantanamo is already having an impact on the way the world sees the war on terror now. Bush's former allies like Britain are rushing to criticize aggressive policies they supported wholeheartedly – up until Obama's election. We can only hope that Western politicians in general take a closer look at the negative effects of the war on terror, especially the role of secret services and the sinister battery of laws passed since 11 September 2001 that curtail civil liberties in the name of protecting us all against terrorism.

The same applies to the muzzling of mass media. If the Obama era brings a new kind of openness, maybe more journalists will start revealing how they have been silenced or forced to play the politicians' game in the interests of "national security". Maybe the power of the commercial mass media will be drastically reduced anyway by bloggers, photographers, writers, musicians etc. sharing their ideas and creativity with the world at large in ways they choose. The trend is already there. The MUT website is one of many thousands of grassroots internet forums around a basic theme or campaign. Even repressive regimes like China and Iran are unable entirely to block the impact of the world wide web. We can only hope that the new leadership spirit in the US leads to reversing anti-democratic laws, lifting censorship and facilitating democratization and responsible watchdog systems for the mass media.

What's most immediately evident, and offers a chance for everybody who wants to promote positive images of minorities, is that the media have discovered the Black message. "Black means respect," a Black rap artist asserted recently on British TV. As if to prove this recent surge of respect (or maybe because the largely white middle-class TV establishment feels unsure how to deal "correctly" with the issue of a Black president), European mass media have suddenly discovered Black people worthy of quoting and interviewing. In a transatlantic discussion on Obama, BBC World radio recently introduced a participant as "one of America's leading Black academics". Before Obama, the man's skin colour wouldn't have been mentioned unless he were going to talk specifically about racial issues. Right now, Black is in, and sub-Saharan Africa is on the media map for reasons more positive than tribal wars, famine and AIDS. In Berlin the city's small Black population celebrated Obama's inauguration day with an event at Amerika Haus organised as part of Black History Month. It advertised "not only the ambassadors of Lesotho and Nigeria, but also Black artists, journalists and academics, to discuss the difference Barack Obama can make." An event like this is already a sign of the difference. Aside from the Black music after the talking, it's a chance to find out about little-known African countries like Lesotho.

The Far Right Threat

The "yes, we can" approach is having a big positive impact. But what are its limitations? First, we have to remember that Obama was elected on a Democratic Party ticket, not as a revolutionary. Many of the changes enthusiasts are predicting now will soon turn out to be apocryphal. Obama's party has all the failings of well-entrenched political structures — and this applies even more to the machinery of state he is taking over. Secondly, not everybody in the USA voted for Obama (though some who didn't are keeping quiet about it now). The new president is facing the same dilemma as every newly elected leader in Western democracies who genuinely wants reform: how to restructure the state machinery in the interests of greater democracy without causing a backlash. In the USA there is an entrenched and extremely powerful right wing core deep inside key ministries and public and private institutions that wants to preserve the secret state at all costs. A gigantic media network that controls many local newspapers and TV and radio stations across the nation constantly churns out fundamentalist right-wing propaganda and influences debate on key social issues such as abortion, homosexuality and school education. And in every town and city there are the people who stubbornly obstruct or oppose change just because they want to hang on to the status quo.

Added to this are a variety of small far right groups made up of people from all walks of life who gather at National Alliance rallies and other neo-fascist events. They call themselves white supremacists, and are scattered around the country, mainly in areas of high immigration. An ex-member of one of these groups, interviewed after a plot to assassinate Obama was discovered in October 2008, estimated the number of hardcore white supremacists as 50,000 nationwide. "They want to create race wars by killing Blacks or Hispanics," he explained. "Then they'll overthrow the US government and rid the country of all non-white people."

Leaving aside the question as to how the US economy would survive without the non-white people — particularly migrants — whom it depends on to work in the factories and farms, it's obvious that these groups are not currently a serious ideological or numerical threat. But this, argued the ex-member, is just what makes them all more dangerous. As they get nowhere at the polls, they are increasingly resorting to violence. "The far right movements are growing slowly, but their new members are increasingly radical," the ex-member said. This is a pattern familiar to observers of the far right scene in Germany, where electoral performance is often no measure of the actual threat. The big difference is the USA's permissive gun laws which make armed violence and assassination all too easy. For almost a decade the "war on terror" has obscured the development of the home grown far right in the USA. With a rash of poisonous sites in internet since Obama's election, white supremacists are already whipping up hate against their Black president.

Luck and The First Lady

Obama is inheriting deep polarisations in US society between the liberal left and the radical far right, between dedicated reformers and diehard conservatives, secular and religious interests, different ethnic communities, the gap between men's and women's situations, and above all, the great and growing divide between rich and poor. The optimism of "We are One", the title of Obama's inaugural celebration, expresses the desire to overcome all this. The new president himself admits it's not going to happen overnight. As Derek Walcott said in his poem for Obama, "I can only wish you luck."

Maybe someday there'll be a Place Obama in Paris, an Obama Square in London and an Obamaplatz in Berlin. Let history decide. Meanwhile, the feminist in me is eager to see what Michelle Obama makes of her role as First Lady at her husband's side. Unfortunately, first ladies, like all women in politics, have to endure even more media trivialisation than male politicians.

The silliest comment in the days after Obama's election to the presidency appeared in the London "Independent" newspaper's Lifestyle section on 6 November 2008, in a piece on Michelle Obama's fashion style:

"One of the few things more exciting than an Obama presidency is what his wife will wear to the inaugural ball. Chances are that she will wear her patriotism on her sleeve by plumping for a US label."

The lifestyle correspondent was clearly still living in the old days when a president's wife was part of the packaging. That was before the Obama era. Let's leave the fashion show to the Oscar ceremony where it belongs, and keep our eyes on the two powerful, mature and highly qualified women at Obama's side: his wife Michelle, and Hillary Clinton. One of the most exciting things about his presidency will be to see what they achieve for the women (and men) of their country and the world.

Many thanks to Caroline Bynum and Adam Blauhut for sharing their perspectives and ideas.

© Karen Margolis for MUT
  20 January 2009

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