Me, My Son and Obama: One Father's Story

The day we brought my new-born son home to our Brooklyn apartment,
an article in the New York Times pointed out that "a black male who
drops out of high school [in the US] is 60 times more likely to find
himself in prison than one with a bachelor's degree". These are the
kind of statistics I often quote in my work. But this time it was
personal. Looking down at him as he snoozed in the brand new car seat,
I thought: "Those are not great odds. I'd better buy some more
children's books."

Over the next few weeks, as we fumbled with
the nappies, pram, barfing and burping, a new, previously unthinkable
option for black American males emerged: the presidency of the United
States. Osceola was born on the weekend Barack Obama declared his
candidacy. This prompted conversations that I would not have had
otherwise. His success, I was told, would signify great things for my
son. Osceola would grow up with an assumption that the highest office
in the land was open to him. That the future could be his. That there
was, I was told, nothing that this child could not achieve.

Back
in February 2007, when Obama announced his candidacy, this never made
much sense to me. The fact that my son suddenly has a tiny theoretical
chance of getting to the White House is less important than the more
real chance of his ending up behind bars (one in three black American
boys born in 2001 will do so) or dead (three black kids are shot every
day). I wanted a president who could change the odds for the many
rather than raise the stakes for a few. I didn't care what they looked
like. It wasn't that I didn't understand the symbolic importance of his
bid. I just did not want to mistake it for substance.

On a
political level, I have always thought he was interesting. Obama's
announcement came 18 months after hurricane Katrina put black America's
collective deprivation and individual success clearly on display. One
man can rise to the presidency and a whole community can sink into the
Gulf of Mexico: anything, I thought, really is possible. And with three
days to go before election day, it looks like the US stands on the
verge of making the historic decision to put a black man in the White
House.

This was no reflection on Obama. Everything I'd heard
about him - not least his opposition to the Iraq war at a time when
such a position was unpopular - was impressive. But his two years in
the Senate suggested he was pretty mainstream and even, at times, a
little suspect. He'd supported Joseph Lieberman (a Democrat who is now
supporting John McCain) in his primary Senate campaign against an
anti-war campaigner. And he voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice as
secretary of state. It wasn't obvious to me that he would be any better
than some other generic Democrat with different pigmentation. The idea
that his presidency would mean anything for Osceola's life never really
crossed my mind.

To express such scepticism before many Obama
supporters was to be accused of cynicism. The true believers do not
just want you to drink the Kool Aid. They demand that you chug it.

The
people my scepticism vexed most were white liberals. Obama had become
prey to the soft bigotry of unreasonable expectations. Describing the
crowd's reaction to him in Rockford, Illinois, Time's Joe Klein noted:
"The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved ... The white people,
by contrast, are out of control." They had found a black politician
they felt comfortable with, and wanted him to be everything: Martin
Luther King, John F Kennedy, a griot, president, vice-president,
motherhood and apple pie. They prattled on about a post-racial America
as though the Jena Six never happened and Sean Bell, a unarmed black
man from Queens who was riddled with bullets on his wedding day, was
still alive.

My wife, who is African American, shared my
reservations about Obama, but saw things differently. She remembers the
thrill of being a young girl when the black Democrat Harold Washington
was elected in her hometown, Chicago. She liked him because her parents
liked him. She could see it was important, but she didn't know why.

"My
dad grew up being told a black person couldn't be a pilot, and my son
is growing up knowing that a black person can be president," she said.
"It's not that racism is gone, it's just that it's not about the idea
that all black people are excluded on the basis of their race from any
part of society or any particular job. That was the racism my parents
grew up with and that is now one generation removed from Osceola." Her
dad became a pilot, as did her brother.

Of course, Obama isn't
standing for Osceola's benefit - which is just as well, because if
Osceola could vote he would most likely support Elmo for mayor of
Sesame Street. But in a sense these projections lie at the heart of any
thoughtful appraisal of the racial dynamics underpinning Obama's
candidacy. The desire to believe we are in a paradigm-shifting moment
must be set against the fact that not every historic first changes the
course of history. Changing our understanding of what is possible
doesn't, in itself, create new possibilities.

I watched Obama
accept the Democratic nomination with my mother-in-law, Janet, in a
cinema on the southside of Chicago. Janet was raised in the South with
the laws that put her at the back of the bus. As a teenager she went
with her mother to see Martin Luther King speak in Philadelphia,
listening in the overflow in the vestry because there were too many
people in the church.

She was the one who first told me about
Obama in 2003. She got involved in his primary campaign for the Senate
when he didn't have a prayer, after she'd seen him on the local public
channel, when he was a state senator. "He seemed like a bright guy,"
she says. "He reasoned his way through things and was always very
impressive." She particularly liked his stance on the war. When he said
he was running for Senate, she signed up as a volunteer.

And
now, here we were just five years later seeing him clinch the deal in
Denver on the big screen. At one point, when he recalled his anti-war
speech in 2002, she punched my arm. "I was there." As she drove me to
my hotel, she would occasionally say to no one in particular: "I just
don't believe it."

Whether Osceola would ever be able to relate
to what a momentous time this is for Janet remains to be seen. But her
response made me think that the late comedian George Carlin was wrong.
Symbols are too important to be left to the symbol-minded. By that
time, my thinking on Obama had evolved. Not so much because of the man,
but the moment. The atmosphere during this campaign has been unlike
anything I've ever seen in a western country. To see so many people -
particularly young people - engaged and hopeful about their political
future after eight depressing years is inspiring. The last time I saw
it was in South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994.

Walking
down Sumter Street during Charleston's Martin Luther King day parade,
watching white volunteers chant: "Obama '08! We're ready. Why wait?"
gave political voice to an America I never doubted existed, but had yet
to see. Among them was a young man who was "so depressed" after Obama's
New Hampshire defeat that he had dropped everything he had been doing
in Guatemala and flown back to help out. Local African Americans lined
the sidewalks, cheering encouragement. Obama's victory in Iowa had
proved that a black candidacy was not a pipe dream.

It was a
moment. Fleeting and maybe even fatuous. But nonetheless a political
moment that produced hopeful human engagement. Within half an hour it
had evaporated. The white volunteers went back to the office and black
people went back to their homes in the poorest parts of town and waited
for change. But that didn't mean it didn't happen or that it couldn't
happen again. Nor was there anyone else who could make it happen.

A
couple months later came Obama's race speech in Philadelphia in
response to the attacks on his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, in which he
addressed black alienation and white disadvantage, set them both in a
historical context, and then called on people to rise above it. It was
a tall order. He pulled it off.

That weekend, a friend invited us
to brunch with a group of other black people to discuss the fallout.
There were nine of us (10 if you include Osceola, who yanked a blind
from the window). It was a typical boho (black bohemian) Brooklyn crowd
of voluntary sector workers, teachers and the like. Most, like me, had
been ambivalent about Obama at the outset. But his candidacy was
becoming a vehicle for something bigger: a teachable moment about the
potential of anti-racist discourse.

A year before, Hillary
Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn, laid out a plan of attack
against Obama. "All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia
and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is
diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for
2050. It also exposes a strong weakness for him - his roots to basic
American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine
America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his
centre fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values ...
Let's explicitly own 'American' in our programmes, the speeches and the
values. He doesn't ... Let's use our logo to make some flags we can
give out. Let's add flag symbols to the backgrounds."

Clinton
rejected Penn's advice, but McCain pretty much adopted it. And at this
point it appears to have failed. This time Republicans have misread
white America's appetite for divisive racial rhetoric and overestimated
its fear of the other. The fears and division are still there. But
whatever the result on Tuesday, they are clearly no longer the decisive
mobilising force they once were.

If there is promise in here
for my son, it is not so much that he is capable of doing anything he
wants - I am his father and it's my responsibility to teach him that -
but that white people won't necessarily stop him. What that does for
his odds of finishing high school or going to jail remains to be seen.
In the meantime, I'm off to the bookshop.