America’s New Chapter
‘Tis.
Frank McCourt concluded his first book, and titled his second, with that one word. When, upon reaching American shores, the storyteller heard it was a great country, all he could do was agree in his Irish idiom.
Years ago, when I read it for the first time, I sneered at what I considered an unsatisfying ending to an otherwise most readable book. But in the early hours of Wednesday morning, trying to snatch a couple of hours of sleep after a night of celebration, I couldn’t help but think of that word.
Good countries navigate the course of history; great ones determine it. And once again, the US has revealed itself as a nation that does not shy away from the challenges of history with a retreat into the safe and known. A country desperately in need of change took a leap of faith, and started a new story.
That’s what I kept thinking that night, as I lay in the sultry damp heat of a rainy night in Kingston, watching the returns pour in. All around the city, election-watch parties were being held and old friends were calling one another, unable to keep the news to themselves.
That’s what I kept saying when the local radio stations, television newsrooms and newspaper columnists kept ringing my phone, asking for a comment. There was an infectious mood here in Jamaica, as there was throughout the Caribbean. When we woke up, bleary-eyed and hung-over, we felt no different as we would on any carnival day, when we rubbed the sleep from our eyes and joined another day of revelry.
What America revealed on Tuesday night was its ability to constantly reinvent itself, and to retake the reins of history. But curiously, in a campaign both extraordinary and dramatic, what perhaps stood out most about the election for me was a banality at its heart. Mr. Obama was elected not because he was black, nor because America was repaying a debt. He was elected because – after a long, gruelling campaign in the midst of a troubled time for the US – he emerged as the most obviously capable leader in the land.
In short, what to me stood out was not that Americans elected a black man to be president. It was that, in the final and perfect realisation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, it no longer mattered that he was black. Americans could make no greater break with the past than that: to put race aside. When one prominent old Jamaican radical – an alumnus of the country’s truncated 1970s socialist experiment – was asked the next morning on the radio how he felt at the result, he replied simply: “Free at last.”
More than anyone else, this night belonged to African-Americans: not merely for its result, but for the central role they ended up playing in it. It is easy to forget that when Mr. Obama first burst onto the American scene, African-American leaders were decidedly ambivalent about him. They questioned whether someone who had not descended of slaves, but of an African immigrant, could really call himself African-American. After all, he had not shared their struggles.
This hesitancy lingered. Right up until early this year, the support of African-Americans for Mr. Obama remained in doubt. Hilary Clinton’s campaign actually tried to capitalise on this, counting on Bill Clinton’s strong support among the US’s black leadership to push him aside.
It was therefore striking that African-Americans decided, in the end, to take Mr. Obama into their hearts. And once they did, they turned out in unprecedented numbers to support him – both in the primaries, and in the election. It is probably not a stretch to say that had it not been for their acceptance of him as one of their own, Mr. Obama would not have been toasting his victory on Wednesday morning.
John Rapley is president of Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI) an independent think tank affiliated to the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and is a columnist for the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper.
Posted by John Rapley in Other | November 7, 2008 12:55PM |