Vol. 2 Response

Last summer an American friend and journalist came to visit us in Berlin. I asked him whether he believed that Barack Obama would be the next US president. The excitement about his remarkable race to the democratic nomination was in full swing in the United States. In Germany, the phenomenon of Barack Obama came to the public's attention more slowly. My friend thought about the question for some time and said: „I think racism will rear its ugly head." Today, Barack Obama is the designated presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, my friend is right. Racism is rearing its ugly head, on both sides of the Atlantic.

On June 5th, 2008, just after Barack Obama's historic victory in the Democratic primaries, the left-leaning Berlin daily tageszeitung (taz) ran the headline „Uncle Barack's Cabin" right above a photograph of the White House. Could there be a more offensive show of contempt for whom may be the first black US President? The reference to the tragic figure of the all-pleasing slave who sacrifices his life is insulting and a well-calculated blow below the belt. Is it futile to hope that German commentators have finally put aside their prejudices regarding Barack Obama's skin colour? Such verbal lapse is neither new nor surprising, if one does not confuse left and liberal with anti-racist credentials. There is no automatic match!

Two months after senator Barack Obama effectively secured the Democratic Party nomination for president  of the United States, it is gratifying to note that the pan-Africanist intellectual world has not for the most part, been lulled to sleep by the Obama "moment."  Instead, as demonstrated by most contributors on this eSymposium, serious guestions are being raised as to the meaning of this "moment" and whether we are about to enter a new phase of politics in the United States, and how developments in the United States will impact the broader pan- African world, and  especially US policy towards Africa.

The discussions provided in this eSymposium range from the importance of recognizing the symbolic importance of the "moment" especially in the critical fact that for the first time in US history, a black man stands a better that even chance to become president of the United States, to the skepticism that a US president, let alone a black one, would fundamentally change the thrust of US policy towards Africa and the pan-African world.  In other words, Barack Obama, with all of his goodwill and determination, is effectively a prisoner of the structural realities of the American political economy.  As the US tries to weave its way through the challenges of globalization, and the indeterminate nature of what it may mean to be the lone super-power, any US president will be under tremendous pressure from domestic constituencies to be narrowly focused on "American national interests." 

Miracles, for the most part, fall outside the purview of academics' intellectual consideration. In fact, the miraculous is by definition disruptive of and anathema to reasonable, rational, and coherent systems of thought. True miracles can be neither anticipated nor predicted; their probability is incalculable and their occurrences are, by most philosophical measures, either mistaken or inexplicable. And, yet, but... the etymology of the word "miracle" suggests, interestingly, that miracles should be the primary interest of philosophers. The English word "miracle" derives from the Latin miraculum ("object of wonder"), from mirari ("to wonder at"), which ought to remind us of the words Plato so carefully placed in Socrates' mouth in the Theaetetus: "...wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder." The Greek words rendered as "miracle" in the English Christian Bibles were semeion ("sign"), teras ("wonder"), and dynamis ("power")-in Vulgate translated respectively as signum, prodigum, and virtus. That is to say, the miraculous, the wondrous, the powerful signs-whether rooted in God, in Nature, in human being or in human making-have been, for ages in the "West," the recognized stimuli for intellectual inquiry.