BEYOND THE MILESTONE - Unless Obama’s victory heralds changes, it will remain a symbol

Postscript
Githa Hariharan
The Telegraph, November 16

There has been a flood of reaction to Barack Obama’s triumph in the presidential elections, and it will probably be a good while before this unruly flood abates. But soon after the news was confirmed, there was a recurring reaction that neatly combined disbelief, amazement and sheer gratitude in a single and simple sentence. “I never thought I would see this day.” This spontaneous reaction was heard over and over again in America. The statement, so heartfelt that it almost sounds raw-skinned, could be understood as saying one of three things. It could be an indication of the relief so many feel at the passing of the eight torturous years of a particularly vicious government. It’s a relief that allows for some hope that “unilateral” decisions will make way for some “multilateral” attempts at decision-making. In other words, there may be hope that the American government will learn to speak to more people and hear more people — both in America and elsewhere.

The reaction could be amazement that a more “international” person — a man of a more heterogeneous background in terms of race, nationality and life experience — is actually going to the White House. In which case, it may be possible to hope that at least some of the insular and jingoistic baggage of the past can be left behind. Perhaps more than lip service will be paid to the fact that contemporary America is, more than ever, a nation of immigrants. And if this can happen, there may even be an acknowledgement that the “American way of life” — something so often anxiously defended by conservatives as if it is an old museum piece that must be preserved in cotton wool — is actually a dynamic, debatable idea.

But most of all, the reaction is gratitude for witnessing a milestone in African-American history. At this point, anyway, very few people would dilute this gratitude by carping about whether Obama is “black enough”. Nor can this reaction be mistrusted as either “merely emotional” or as “overemphasizing race”. It’s impossible to forget that this election victory has happened in a country where white did mean master and black did mean slave. There’s no getting away from this history, or its legacy. In fact, there is no need to go all the way back to the years of slavery. Just the last 50-odd years would do to get a sense of the distance travelled, and the pain suffered en route. It hasn’t been that long since racial discrimination and racial stereotypes were not only real, they were also legal.

Not all that long ago, in 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. The subsequent bus boycott organized by the black community in Montgomery lasted for more than a year till the buses were desegregated. Parks, an icon of the civil rights movement, died three years too early to witness the milestone of 2008 — she died at the age of 92 in 2005.

A year before Parks’s gesture to affirm black rights, the 1954 landmark case, Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, resulted in a unanimous judgment from the supreme court. The court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, overturning the 1896 Plessy versus Ferguson judgment that sanctioned “separate but equal” segregation of the races. The 1954 ruling stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”. It paved the way for large-scale desegregation — a process fraught with difficulty, and a process, many would argue, that is yet to be fully achieved in 2008.

Again, it was only four decades back, 44 years to be precise, that Lyndon B. Johnson signed the most sweeping civil rights legislation to prohibit discrimination of all kinds based on race, colour, religion or national origin. Asserting that civil rights laws alone are not enough to remedy discrimination, President Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which enforced affirmative action for the first time. It required government contractors to “take affirmative action” toward prospective minority employees in all aspects of hiring and employment.

But while laws and executive orders are important, neither can bridge that wide and frustrating gap between sanctioned equality and flesh-and-blood inequality. In 1964, the same year President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the bodies of three civil rights workers — two white, one black — were found in an earthen dam, six weeks into a federal investigation. The civil rights workers were men in their early twenties, working to register black voters in Mississippi. When they went to investigate the burning of a black church, they were arrested by the police on speeding charges, and incarcerated for several hours. Then they were released after dark into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, who murdered them. The sad tailpiece of this already tragic story is that it was only as recently as 2005 — on the 41st anniversary of the Mississippi civil rights murders of 1964 — that the ringleader, Edgar Ray Killen, was convicted of manslaughter.

It is true that the 2008 electoral verdict in America is not as much about race as it is about a rejection of the Bush years, and what they have done to both America and other parts of the world. But in embracing the idea of change, the American electorate has come upon a powerful milestone for equality.

Despite greed, warmongering and the seduction of empire, America and Americans have travelled a long and difficult road towards this milestone. Now that a black man will soon move into the White House, will the ground realities really change? Will the mainstream political voices address the racial and economic disadvantage eating into the lives of the common Americans more directly? Will they find alternative strategies to the military bullying abroad? Will there be real attempts to shift attitudes and dispel stereotypes — not only about African-Americans, but also Arabs, Muslims, foreigners?

For now, there is a terrible temptation to romanticize Obama as the new and wondrous knight of utopia. There is an equally strong temptation to air the mothballed liberal voices in America, let them have their say, or sing and celebrate for a happy, if brief, intermission. The intermission is brief because a milestone is only a signpost. Its rhetoric may be moving; it may be cathartic. But it has to lead to something, and something substantial enough to make the milestone meaningful. Otherwise, it is only a fragile symbol in a museum. In his address at the Democratic National Convention, in San Francisco in 1984, Jesse Jackson referred to “the call of conscience, redemption, expansion, healing and unity”. “Leadership,” he said, “must heed the call of conscience, redemption, expansion, healing and unity, for they are the key to achieving our mission.” If the possibilities the milestone of 2008 suggest are not to be squandered, the call of conscience may demand that at least some of the policies and practices of the Bush years will have to be put in reverse gear as soon as possible.