The Meaning and Implications of the Obama Phenomenon

Introduction By Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

 

The euphoria over Senator Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic Party primaries in early June as the party's presumptive nominee in the presidential elections in November is now giving way to serious reflection on what his nomination and a possible Obama presidency might mean for the United States, the Pan-African world, and the world at large. There is little question that Senator Obama's campaign has been electrifying in its audacity and implications.

 

The historic appeal of Senator Obama's candidacy can be attributed to complex social forces in America's contemporary domestic and international political economies, not least the country's utter exhaustion following eight years of the Bush Administration, perhaps the worst in American history. The Bush presidency has bankrupted the country at home and diminished it abroad, left its economy in recessionary tatters and its international reputation terribly battered, thanks to the dangerous marriage between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, the lethal consummation of capitalist and imperialist hubris.

 

Driving the Obama phenomenon are other complicated dynamics, including generational, racial, gender, and class shifts in the ecology of American society and politics. Some of these forces are easily discernible, others barely perceptible, representing long-term and conjunctural trends including the possible collapse of the Republican coalition and supremacy over political and policy discourse in America's post-civil rights and post-Cold War realignments. The Bush presidency has severely devalued Republican currency as the custodians of national security, moral values, and economic management. Race is their last card.

 

Structural forces cannot of course be the sole explanations. There is also the organizational prowess of the Obama campaign, combining old-fashioned grassroots community organizing, hardball party politicking, and digital mobilization into an electoral juggernaut that vanquished the indomitable Clinton machine. In this equation, we must add Obama's own complex biography, which taps into four narratives of historic and contemporary American political discourses. In other words, Obama's biography, as he himself states in The Audacity of Hope, serves "as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."

 

There is the son of a Kenyan father, the Obama of the migrant narrative, deeply etched in the myth of the American dream for non-black Americans. There is the self-declared black man married to a black woman, the Obama of the African American narrative of longstanding oppression and marginalization. There is the person born in Hawaii and partly raised in Indonesia with a multicultural family on several continents, the Obama of the transnational narrative that America's cosmopolitan classes aspire to for their despised country. Then there is the son of a white woman, the Obama of the biracial narrative for those who dream of a postracial America.

 

Each Obama appeals to different constituencies at home and abroad: Africans and African Americans seeking redress, biracials in search of recognition, whites desperate for redemption, and the rest of the world looking for respite from America's imperial arrogance and violence. "As such," Obama writes, "I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them." That has already started to happen as he is forced to spell out specific positions on the thorny issues facing America's domestic and foreign policy from the Iraq war to the price of gas.

 

The contributors to the eSymposium insightfully address many of these questions: Obama as the signified and signifier of black citizenship and globality, the symbolic and substantive implications of his candidacy, the power of hope and the limits of structural change his presidency would represent, the quintessential Americanness of this most gifted of politicians and the anxious Pan-African expectations pinned on him. While celebrating the historic achievement and possibilities that Obama's candidacy imply, all the contributors caution against investing a possible Obama presidency with the illusions of transformational power.

 

I fully share their caution. For all the excitement generated by his candidacy, Obama is not a radical figure by any stretch of the political imagination. He is beholden more to capital than labor, to the elites than the poor, to neo-liberalism than social democracy, to American hegemony than global disarmament, to American supremacy than Pan-African solidarity. In fact, as far as the Pan-African world is concerned, it is remarkable how little he has spoken about Africa, the Caribbean and other countries with large African diaspora populations. His first post-primary victory meeting was to shamefully supplicate before the Jewish lobby.

 

Obama's Africa, as outlined in his book The Audacity of Hope, and on his campaign website, is the conventional pathological Africa of disease, poverty, corruption, dictatorships, and war that plunges him "into cynicism and despair," until he is reminded that charity, western philanthropy, not trade and partnership, can go a long way to help this benighted continent of his father and numerous Kenyan relatives.

 

If Senator Obama is to develop a more progressive policy towards Africa and the African diaspora at large including those in his own country who have helped catapult him to the dizzying heights of American politics that no African American has ever reached, we have to hold him accountable by keeping vigilant and offering critical support and principled criticism.

 

 

Failures of the Intellectual: Barack Obama, Black Agency, and the Burden of History By Pius Adesanmi

 

The timeline of black agency has been determined to a great extent in the last six centuries by the need to overcome man-made historical impediments, notably slavery, racism, colonialism, neocolonialism - and their new forms in the present - on the one hand, and the necessity to validate the black world's contributions to what black luminaries like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor have described as the "civilization de l'universel" on the other hand. This imperative of rehabilitating the black subject and relocating her within what Sylvia Wynter calls the sign of "Man" has taken such diverse routes as Indigénisme, the Harlem Renaissance, Pan-Africanism, Négritude, the Civil Rights movement, decolonization, liberation struggles/wars, and the anti-apartheid struggle. While some of these routes of black agency were largely discursive, some were praxilic, and some others were a combination of discourse and praxis. What united them was their overarching force of interpellation across global black communities. They were all grands récits that transcended their own immediate contexts of articulation to become transnational sites of black self-fashioning through a strategy based largely on the creation of an imagined community of black memory.

 

The fault lines of these strategies became manifest shortly after the independence era in Africa. At that point, the identitarian claims and the politics of the nation-state combined with the contested nature of memory to problematize and unhinge transnational black modes of affiliation and identification, which were organized around race and history. The nation-state, for instance, instituted an order of localized identities which was incompatible with the oneiric impulses of a transcendental black globality. For example, pan-African nationalists of the pre-independence era increasingly became Ghanaian, Nigerian, or Kenyan nationalists as national imaginaries and narratives emerged. The postcolonial irrationalities of the African state, which considerably weakened its national identity myths and created room for the reinforcement of ethnic identities, did not help matters. The pressures of localization in the arena of identity had the principal consequence of undermining the seamless globality of black memory and history. In this context, Countee Cullens's "What is Africa to Me?", a question that the generation of W.E.B du Bois answered very unambiguously by projecting Africa as a romanticized ancestral home became, for subsequent generations of African Americans, the guilty location of greedy, venal, and inhuman ancestors who "sold our ancestors" to slavery. The romanticized Guinée of the Indigénistes, depicted so poignantly in Euzhan Palcy's film, Sugar Cane Alley, became, for subsequent generations of Caribbean blacks, an absurd collection of rickety nation-states whose sorry fortunes in the modern world make continental Africans look like subjects evolving into a Hobbesian universe.

 

These conditions inaugurated an order of conceptual delinking from the idea of a black globality in ways so radical as to render the relationship between Africa and her diaspora fractious at best. It is only in such invidious conditions that Paul Gilroy's project in The Black Atlantic could have had the resonance it had in the Academy. The book's subterranean ideology seems to be the idea of a black diasporic world shorn of its roots in Africa. Paul Gilroy's logic is also implicitly at work in some of August Wilson's plays, where the idea of African American roots seems only traceable to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean - the mythical City of Bones - and not beyond. With Wilson and Gilroy, black history seems to start in medias res in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Alex Haley's Kunta Kinte is advised not to look beyond the Middle Passage for his roots! But these are only the positive dimensions of the conceptual split in black globality. Worse is to come with the Keith Richburg of Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa and the Henry Louis Gates Jnr of Wonders of the African World. In these two instances, the split is total and the sentiments projected on Africa range from inculpation (why did you sell us?) to revulsion and outright spite. This split is, of course, mirrored in curricular trajectories that sequester African and Africana studies in separate universes in academia. In some North American Universities, Africanists and Africana studies specialists must struggle for the rare handshake across formidable disciplinary Berlin Walls.

 

Against this background, the emergence and rise of Barack Hussein Obama is arguably the single most important inflatus for the transcendence of this split and the resurgence of a new kind of black globality in the 21^st century. For Obama is both subject and sign. Influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, only structuralists dared to elevate the sign above the subject. Yet the sign, Obama, leaves one with little choice than to risk this dangerous structuralist maneuver. Obama-as-sign inaugurates the moment of a transnational black consciousness not necessarily moored on contested memories and histories but on new, hitherto unimaginable possibilities and directions in blackdom. Within the schemes of globalization and transnational capitalism, where subjecthood is increasingly determined by the propinquities of MAC (mutually assured connectivity), it is significant that the iconic sign around which a new global black consciousness has begun to coalesce is an ontological summary of the orders of the moment: black but biracial; at once African and African American; Westerner but Other; Christian sired by a Moslem father; American with marginalized childhood localizations in Hawaii and Indonesia; elitist (Harvard) but rooted in the plebeian lore of Chicago's South Side! This sign is métissage ad infinitum.

 

The pluralized integument of this sign, the planetarity of its scopic regime, its constantly unfolding dimensions, is what makes it so apt a metaphor for the readiness of a race that has been despised and excluded for so many centuries to stake a decisive claim to the White House - the last bastion of the first person narrator of modernity and the post-Cartesian appropriator of History, the Western White male. The transcendence of the Obama sign is implicit in the rallying cry - yes we can! Beyond its immediate function as a vivifying chant for campaign rallies lies a deeper imbrication in black aesthetics. Watching Obama declaim the yes-we-can chant in the frenzied cadence of black southern pulpit performance is to be in presence of the choric, antiphonal call-and-response morphology of black oral performance, especially in Africa. "No, you can't!" has, for five centuries, been the life-force of modernity's negation of black agency. The Obama sign offers a choric, antiphonal negation of an original negation. And the consequences here have been formidable, unlike past attempts by the black world to negate the negation. Over a century ago, one black man, W.E.B du Bois, posited that race would be the dominant question of the 20^th century. In "yes we can!", another black man opens the first decade of the 21^st century with a dominant affirmation of possibilities. The historical significance of this sign explains why Obama-the-subject's pragmatic and politically necessary post-racial discourse and mien in the United States has cut no ice with his audiences in Africa and the black diasporic world. These audiences are interpellated by Obama-the-sign as the site of a new black globality and a new black consciousness. And, for them, that sign is unapologetically black. It is not post-racial. It needs not be.

 

The distinction between sign and subject is a crucial one to keep in mind in order to be able to engage the Obama phenomenon adequately. Recognition of this crucial distinction is what defines the responsibilities of the black intellectual as an interpreter of the Obama moment. Let me enter a crucial point here. I have zero sympathy for meretricious claims to intellectual objectivity or non-partisanship by those who have failed, tragically, in their duties as interpreters of blackdom's opening act in the 21^st century. Only the most absurd understanding of the nature of intellection would blind anyone to the fact that intellectual enunciation and non-partisanship is a kindergarten oxymoron. I have no patience with the unimplicated intellectual.

 

This clarification is essential as I attempt to shed some light on what a good number of African and black diasporic intellectuals who opted for Hillary Clinton got wrong in terms of the responsibilities of the intellectual, the black intellectual. As the Obama drama unfolded, the internet (listservs, blogs, ejournals, eMags, online newspapers, African and black diasporic chat rooms, etc) was awash with the hand-wringing treatises of avowed black Hillaphiles. Some American Africans, especially Nigerian-Americans, were particularly obstreperous, weeping louder than the bereaved in their support of Hillary Clinton and their disavowal of Obama. They offered unsolicited explanations and rationalizations of their political choices even as Billary's too clever by half interjection of race and racism into the entire process increasingly made their positions slippery.

 

What stood out in their submissions was the facile assumption that their support of a White female candidate was evidence of (1) their newly acquired sophistication as superior human beings who have transcended race as opposed to the black/African supporters of Obama who, in their estimation, are still slaves to the congenital interpellations of race and ethnicity; (2) their sophisticated status as objective, unimplicated, non-partisan intellectuals, insofar as non-partisan is read as non-identification with their racial kind. As they pushed these positions, they almost always concentrated on the individualized proclivities of politics and choice. They tragically misread the 2008 Democratic primaries as a mere political contest between two candidates. It was a bad time to take a sabbatical from discernment. A bad time to fail to see the obvious fact that one of the candidates had become subject and sign. They failed to see that what galvanized folks from Nigeria to Saint Lucia, from Kenya to South Carolina, from South Africa to Bahia de Salvadore, was the sign and not the subject. In their histrionic quest to perform their subjecthood as postmodern African American and American African citizens of the United States who, unlike the rest of us, are above race, they failed to see that Obama-the-subject has little to do with, and absolutely no control over Obama-the-sign. Above all, they failed to understand the historicity of the sign. Follow the sign! This sign is history, not politics, as Tavis Smiley and BET founder, Bob Johnson, found out a tad late. Whether Obama eventually becomes the first black President of the United States or not is a mute point. What is important is the historical moment and order, which the sign he unleashed has inaugurated for the black race. And the black intellectual is called upon to be the first interpreter of that moment. Failing to read history correctly is excusable. However, does any black person who carries the tag, "intellectual", have the right to fail to read history at all?

 

 

The Obama Campaign - A Paradigm Shift By Cary Fraser

 

Since his victory in the Democratic primaries to become the presumptive Democratic candidate for the 2008 American Presidential election, Barack Obama's campaign has moved from its focus on insurgency within the Democratic Party to the development of a strategy aimed at revitalizing American democracy in the general election. It is an extraordinary challenge following the Republican Party's championship of a punitive politics of exclusion over four decades that was inaugurated under Nixon in 1968, gained its ascendancy under Reagan from 1980-1988, was most effectively symbolized in the "Willie Horton" campaign against Michael Dukakis conducted by George H.W. Bush in 1988, and which has culminated in the George W. Bush administration with its dubious victories in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.. In effect, Obama's campaign will be shaped by the twin imperatives of redeeming the fortunes of the Democratic party as a national political force, and revitalizing the politics of inclusion that shaped American politics from the passage of the 19^th Amendment which guaranteed women the right to vote in 1920 to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which promised the right to vote to all eligible citizens without regard to race.

 

Given these imperatives, Obama will have to demonstrate the capacity to unite a Democratic party that has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for self-mutilation since 1968. However, it is obvious that the Democratic Party's collective leadership across several generations has already embraced Obama and is now at work forging a platform for the party's nominating convention that will help to shape his campaign strategy. Further, he will have the opportunity to use the Presidential campaign to forge ties with constituencies outside of the Democratic Party as the 2008 election promises to be the opening of a process of electoral realignment that may be as significant as that of the New Deal era. A Democratic Party victory in 2008 offers the promise of majorities in both Houses of Congress as well as the Presidency. It will mark a significant shift in the fortunes of the Democratic Party which, like the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression, will be charged with rescuing America from the economic misfortune and ideological irrelevance of a Republican party that has lost its way. It was Roosevelt's success with the New Deal that set the stage for the Democratic ascendancy over the period 1932-1968 and an Obama victory in 2008 may well signal a new era in American politics after the domestic and foreign policy failures that have relegated the Bush administration to its current status as an embarrassment.

 

It is this shift from the primaries to the national election, and the elevation of Obama to the standard bearer of the Democratic Party that will be a testing time for Obama. He has become the symbol of widely divergent expectations across the political spectrum and much of the election campaign will be about forging a winning coalition that reaches beyond the Democratic Party. He will be challenged to walk a series of fine lines in dealing with issues from dealing with the immediate legacies of Bush - on Wall Street and in foreign policy - to reshaping budget priorities for health care, funding educational mandates, improving national infrastructure, energy policy, and devising long-term solutions to the Social Security program. Even before the election, his campaign will have to present a vision and policies that can be used as sounding board for the challenges of governance. As Presidential candidate, he will have the opportunity to draw on the wide range of talent available to the Democratic Party to test out the ideas that will have appeal to a broad range of constituencies.

 

He has the capacity and the resources to build a winning coalition but the ultimate task of governance will be the area in which Obama will pose the most serious challenges. Those challenges will arise not from a lack of resources but from the weight of expectations that have been aroused by his campaign - expectations that link both domestic and international constituencies. Obama's speech to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee on June 4, the day after winning the majority of delegates in the primaries, has already signaled the conflicts that will emerge between his electoral campaign and government policy. In attempting to persuade the Jewish-American community that he was supportive of Israel, following George W. Bush's veiled attack in the Israeli Knesset on Obama's advocacy of diplomatic engagement with Iran as "appeasement", Obama said: "

 

Let me be clear. Israel's security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive, and that allows them to prosper - but any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

 

His comments were assailed by the Palestinians as representative of no change from the Bush administration's policies and Obama's campaign issued a statement indicating that Obama's view was that: "Jerusalem is a final status issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties" and forming part of "an agreement that they both can live with." The episode revealed the kind of minefields that Obama will confront in the campaign and one of the key issues that he will have to address is how to balance the call for change in Washington with the flexibility to accept the need for continuity at policy levels if he wins the election. These tensions between calls for change and policy continuities in governance were also present in the earlier NAFTA and Samantha Power episodes that erupted during the Democratic contest in the primary campaign.

 

Beyond the Middle East, one of the important issues that Obama will have to face is the issue of Latin America and the emergence of progressive nationalist regimes in the region that have been unenthusiastic about the Bush administration. How will the Obama campaign articulate a policy towards Latin America where Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil - all of which have significant communities of indigenous and African descent - have become increasingly sensitive to the domestic politics of race. The Obama campaign can become a catalyst for increasing mobilization among the region's historically disadvantaged communities. But a very relevant question that will need to be addressed is whether Obama will have to fashion a "Good Neighbor Policy" that will reawaken the economic anxieties that have been triggered by NAFTA? If so, how will the US relationship with Latin America be reshaped and will the shift encompass a redefinition of the Cuban-American relationship which is fraught with very potent ideological and racial tensions?

 

Alternatively, will a strategic shift in the Middle East result in an increasing reliance upon West African oil resources? If so, how will that shift towards deeper engagement with Africa affect US advocacy of democracy and human rights in the region? How will the articulation of a vision of sustained economic engagement with Africa affect domestic political debates where race remains a volatile issue? How will African governments view an Obama administration? Muammar Gadafy's recent denunciation of Obama as a black man suffering from an inferiority complex because of his statement to AIPAC on Israel suggests some of the ways in which the challenge of reconciling domestic calls for change with international expectations of change in both rhetoric and substance can be fraught with unintended consequences.

 

In the case of Europe, how will the Obama campaign affect the politics of race within European societies which confront the question of integration of minority communities of African, Arab, Asian, Caribbean, and Muslim descent? How will Obama's campaign reshape the rhetoric of political inclusion and democratic representation in European societies which are grappling with the ghettoization of these communities? Can Obama's campaign serve as a way of framing the language of multi-cultural democracy for its application in the European context?

 

These are some of the wider range of issues that are coming to the fore as the Obama campaign gains momentum. In many, ways, Obama's campaign signals a major shift in both the American and global context and that shift will provoke challenges that should not be underestimated. It will also require an unprecedented mobilization of intellectual resources to help shape the paradigms and policies that are resulting from that shift in consciousness.

 

 

Obama's Victory: The Easy Part's Over, Now The Hard Work Begins By Wandia Njoya

 

A few years ago, my brother and I watched black American comedian Chris Rock's film Head of State, which could actually been seen as a precursor to the Obama campaign. In his film, Chris Rock plays Mays Giliam, the ordinary guy and local politician who regularly comes to people's aid. A twist of fate makes some political campaigners scheme to make Mays the presidential candidate, with the certainty that he would lose. However, Giliam gets wind of the scheme in mid-campaign, stands up for what he believes by addressing issues central to the hearts of the majority of Americans, such as welfare and health care. He clinches the country's top seat by appealing to the apathetic middle and lower class voters. In one hilarious scene, women skimpy closes and high heels - the garb of commercial sex workers - awkwardly run to get to the polling booths just before closing time. It is this population of the unseen but the backbone of America that gets Mays Giliam into the White House.

 

As the movie ended, my brother and I wondered aloud whether a candidate can actually win the American presidency using such a strategy. We fantasized but eventually settled for a definite "No." Thankfully, Obama has proved us wrong.

 

I must admit that the skepticism which we voiced then has haunted me until Obama actually won the nomination. I did not have the audacity to hope for fear of being disappointed. And whatever the outcome of the election - although I cannot imagine Obama not winning - his victory does signal what black people need most: Hope Despite the Odds.

 

The last time African peoples had such hope was in the 60's, during the movements for social change led by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in the US, the revolution in Cuba and the independence movements in Africa and Asia. However, it appears that Africa revolted because it could no longer stomach the exploitation and suffering at the hands of the West. And this fatigue was not enough to break free from oppression, because in order for the emancipation to last, people also needed a vision of what they wanted to be, and to commit their "brains and muscles" - as Fanon would say - to making that vision a reality. More than that, the people needed continuous political education, so that they could understand the international dynamics of imperialism, as well as the nature of the programs that were being implemented in their own country. And as Cuba painfully discovered, the people also need arms to fight because imperialism persistently waged a neurotic war against the empowerment of ordinary people.

 

Therefore, to maintain freedom, people needed commitment, discipline and a deaf ear to the disapproval of the West, something which only Cuba, led by Castro, was able to follow through. Castro also understood that the country needed to train professionals en masse and send them to every corner of the country to provide health and education to the masses. Frantz Fanon spelled out a similar vision in his last book, The Wretched of the Earth, but in contrast to Cuba, independent African countries continued to rely on a few missionaries who treated and taught a few people in exchange for their souls and a handful of miserly scholarships to professionals who would receive training, but who would be too culturally traumatized to have a significant impact in their home countries, if and when they returned.

 

Fanon underestimated the importance of one essential ingredient, the one that Obama's victory offers us today: HOPE. African peoples, in particular, had been psychologically and traumatized, so that their leaders caved in to imperialism's manipulation and outright aggression against efforts to uplift their people. And for the last 40 odd years, each commendable effort towards a genuine African democracy and social revolution from icons such as Congo's Patrice Lumumba, Guinea's Sekou Toure, Bourkina Faso's Thomas Sankara and Tanzania ‘s Julius Nyerere faded under economic and political sabotage from the Western world, political assassinations carried out by the African Uncle Toms such as Mobutu and Compraore, and dictatorship in Guinea and Tanzania. These events led Africans to despair, for it seemed that no matter how many genuine leaders we had, they would eventually crumble under the weight of a malevolent Western world and its puppets on our continent.

 

And so Obama's victory affirms two things: hope as the passion that drives humanity in a quest for better life, and the importance of the ordinary people - rather than the elite - as the driving force for change.

 

That said, there is work to be done, and I hope that Obama can remind people of that fact. The changes he wants to implement in the education and health care in the United States can only come through the hard work of the citizens themselves, rather than solely through policy. A crucial element of this work is a fundamental shift in America's attitudes. Americans will have to abandon the myth in pulling oneself by the bootstraps, paying as little tax as possible, and not subsidizing the vulnerable sections of society such as the poor, the single mothers, and historically disenfranchised black, Native American and Latino populations.

 

For America to realize the change that Obama represents, it will have to do the hard work of abandoning individualism and internalizing the African proverb, popularized by the now vanquished Hillary Clinton, which states that it takes a village to raise a child. Obama's charisma has the potential to lead Americans to do this, but only if he accompanies his brilliant speeches with constant political education, that is, discussing concrete matters, policies and budgets with the people, rather than issuing coded speeches for the media, pundits and political analysts to demystify for the general population.

 

In fact, it is the lack of political education and discussion of concrete issues that makes Obama's achievement distinctly American, rather than African-American or Pan-African. The fundamental contradiction of the United States, and of Obama's campaign, is the veneration of grand ideas such as freedom, democracy and, in this case, hope, without an accompanying discussion in the American public discourse of what concrete measures will entrench those values. This contradiction, on which American politics is founded, accounts for how America has for centuries convinced its citizens that it is exporting freedom abroad, while citizens of the Third World testify that this export always took the form of invasions and impoverishment at the hands of Western armies, the IMF and the World Bank. Similarly, Obama's proposals contradict the goals and lofty ideals he venerates. He talks of reducing the over-reliance on petrol and the pollution from gas emissions, but not of Americans valorizing and investing in public transport and reducing the use of personal cars. He attacks the prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex, but does not urge Americans to take social responsibility for how it mis-educates and disenfranchises its population. He speaks of America abandoning its image as a world bully, but on the other hand affirms America's claim to dictate standards by supporting Israel, castigating Castro, saying that Cuba has not enjoyed freedom for 50 years, and failing to criticize America's rape of Haiti for the last 2 centuries and instead offering a fact-finding mission. Yet a simple film or book on Haiti would save tax-payers money and give Obama a good picture of the injustice that Haiti has suffered and continues to suffer.

 

By contrast, liberation movements in the Pan-African world have matched rhetoric with concrete action carried out by the people. Martin Luther King Jnr. led bus boycotts and strikes and Malcolm X instilled discipline in young men, advocated for self defense by black Americans and even had a gun to protect his family. Thomas Sankara reduced the salaries of civil servants, had his children shuttled to school on bicycles, and implemented tree planting, vaccination and other programs at the level of the general population. Jean-Bertrand Aristide called on France to pay reparations to Haiti, and during his short stint was able to increase the number of schools available to the poor and working class. The Cuban revolution was not simply about expelling American monopolies, but also training and putting to work Cuban professionals and students, and now Cuba is the world's leader in the provision of education and health care.

 

Because of the contrast between these predecessors and Obama's campaign, I see Obama's historic achievement the same as Nelson Mandela's release from prison and South Africa's first multi-racial elections. In both the United States and South Africa, events were accompanied by great excitement and hope, and marked a significant milestone which African peoples had worked hard, for centuries, to achieve. But in South Africa, as in other African countries, the leaders failed to impress upon their people that the change they expected would not come easy, that it required hard work from the citizens and not simply a change in government leadership. They failed to demand reparation from those who have benefited from racism, or implement a process of healing and reconciliation among the disenfranchised. This is the failure that led to the high rates of crime and rape, and most recently, of the xenophobic attacks in South Africa from a population unable to see that their destiny is in their hands, rather than in receiving a slice of the national cake presumably baked during apartheid. The same disillusionment could occur during and after Obama's presidency unless Obama attains the mark of a true revolutionary, which is to mobilize the same energy he has used for the campaign to do the actual work of compensating the people America has oppressed, and changing America and its relationship with the world.

 

On the other hand, African peoples of the world also have to implement the change that Obama says we can believe in. It is also up to us, in our classrooms, offices, farms, places of worship and homes to take concrete measures that begin to redirect humanity from the current insane direction of capitalism and onto the road towards valuing, caring and working for the benefit of each other.

 

Speaking of homes...the need for a new human ethic is particularly important for gender relations among black peoples. Unfortunately, Obama's presidency has the potential to comfort black men in their pursuit for Eurocentric patriarchal values that are the foundation of the oppression of African women worldwide. Space does not allow me to develop this idea further, although I have mentioned it in my Zeleza Post entry responding to Alice's Walker's endorsement of Obama.

 

 

A Prodigal Politician: The Possibilities and Limits of a More Enlightened U.S. Foreign Policy Towards Africa Under Barack Obama By Carina Ray

 

Let me begin by making a few disclaimers. First, I am a registered Democrat (for lack of a better alternative). Second, I support Barack Obama's candidacy for the presidency. Third, I believe that he will pursue a more enlightened foreign policy towards Africa than George Bush has and more importantly than John McCain would.

 

But let's not delude ourselves, Barack Obama is not Africa's prodigal son, he is an American politician running for the presidency of the United States of America. His family ties to Africa (Kenya to be exact) have, however, given him a greater personal connection to the continent and its people than any other American presidential candidate before him. As far as I am aware he also has the most cosmopolitan upbringing of any presidential candidate to date. These facts combined with his intellectual strength, eloquence, and ability to think outside of the box suggest that if elected president he will pursue a more diplomacy-oriented and judicious foreign policy in general. With regard to Africa, the simple fact that the continent is already on his radar further suggests we can expect him to have a greater hand in proactively crafting his administration's Africa agenda, rather than doing what most US presidents have done before him: neglect Africa except when the US's strategic interests are involved, and we all know how that story repeatedly turned out. Without exception, US intervention to secure its interests in Africa has been disastrous for the continent. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, still hasn't recovered from decades of Mobutu Sese Seko's US-sponsored kleptocracy.

 

While we certainly have cause for hope, we also need to be mindful of the very real constraints that Barack Obama is laboring under and how these limitations necessarily affect his ability to imagine and enact a foreign policy that departs from the past. Inasmuch as his family ties might work in Africa's favor, they also pose a viable threat to his ability to be seen as an impartial advocate for Africa. Google the keywords "Obama" and "Africa" and in a few clicks you will come across sites like www.freedomsenemies.com where considerable space is devoted to portraying Obama as a candidate whose ties to Kenya and Islam are greater than his ties to America and Christianity. We've already been given a stark, indeed depressing, example of how Obama has sought to counteract his detractors' claims that he is a Muslim and therefore likely to roll back America's staunch defense of Israel. The morning after he clinched the Democratic nomination he appeared in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and gave an over-the-top pledge of his support for the Israeli state. Indeed after promising no less than 30 billion dollars over the next decade in military aid to Israel, he declared to the AIPAC audience that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." While it is conventional wisdom that no candidate could win the presidency without toeing the line on Israel, Obama's speech had the effect of making the Bush administration's stance on Israel seem progressive, despite its disregard for Palestinian humanity, dignity and wellbeing over the last eight years!

 

Rather than demonstrating where Obama truly stands on the Palestinian issue (because I do believe he would like to see a solution that respects the Palestinian people and their struggle for a viable independent state), his speech is an indication of his tendency to overcompensate for his paternal family's Islamic faith and to buckle under pressure from the right. Indeed, his lack of sensitivity to the feelings of millions of Muslims around the world was evident even prior to his AIPAC address. In his now-famous speech on race, he blamed the conflicts in the Middle East solely on "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam," while giving Israel a free pass. Obama's remarks not only blemished an otherwise remarkable speech, but also glossed over historical facts and disregarded the complex root causes of a conflict that continues to threaten global security and stability. Here one sees so clearly that being Muslim has become the "new Black". In the post-9/11 world race is no longer the last frontier, religion and specifically Islam is. The idea that a Black man could become president doesn't seem so far-fetched in comparison to the chances of a Muslim.

 

If Obama has already gone overboard trying to allay fears that his familial connections to Islam pose a threat to America's "special" relationship with Israel, we ought to be equally concerned that he could respond to accusations that he is biased in favor of Africa because of his Kenyan roots, by underemphasizing Africa as a policy priority. Inasmuch as he has played down race so as not to alienate white voters, he has only played up his Kenyan roots to emphasize his worldliness as an asset that would allow him to better lead America in an increasingly globalized world. While he was widely lauded as a prodigal son when he visited South Africa, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Chad, and most especially Kenya in 2006, he is better understood as a prodigal politician, whose homecoming to Africa-given his political ambitions-must be less about "coming home" and more about beefing up his foreign policy credentials. In short, Obama's family ties necessitate that he tread gingerly when it comes to arguing that Africa should be a major policy priority.

 

Ultimately the promises and pitfalls for Africa of an Obama presidency are two sides of the same identity politics coin. Heads: from "Day One" he'll already have Africa on his radar and accordingly we can be optimistic that his administration will craft a more enlightened foreign policy towards Africa. Tails: he may turn the frequency of his internal Africa radar down in order to stave off accusations that he's inappropriately prioritizing Africa over other national security issues. Of course, as of now, this is all conjecture.

 

So what can we say, in a more definitive fashion, about where Obama stands on Africa? If we are to go by his official website Africa is featured on the list of his top eight foreign policy priorities, which in descending order are: Ending the War in Iraq; Iran; Renewing American Diplomacy; Nuclear Weapons, Building a 21^st Century Military; Bipartisanship and Openness; Israel; and Africa. Rather than taking umbrage at Africa's bottom position on the list, I am pleasantly surprised that it is on the list to begin with (needless to say Africa doesn't feature at all in John McCain's foreign policy priorities). Coming in right after Israel on a list that doesn't even mention China is, I think, quite suggestive of how important Africa is to Obama. According to his web site, stopping the genocide in Darfur, ending the conflict in Congo, and bringing former Liberian president Charles Taylor to justice comprise the three main foci of Obama's Africa plan. With regards to Darfur, Obama has already put his money where his mouth is, divesting about $180,000 of his personal financial holdings from Sudan-related stock. While I was inspired to see the forgotten genocide (my phrase, not Obama's) in the Democratic Republic of Congo addressed in his platform, I noticed that his African agenda is primarily reactive rather than proactive. Let's hope that once he wins the presidency he'll bring on board a group of advisors that can help him undo the "destructive engagement" ethos that has defined America's policy towards Africa since the Cold War. Perhaps then we can begin to formulate an African foreign policy that regards the continent as something other than a basket case. Ensuring fair trade, which would allow African producers to access American markets on more equitable terms, would be a good start. This would necessitate that Obama address the thorny question of subsidies for American farmers - a typical presidential task like this, however, could quickly turn into a loyalty test unique to an Obama presidency.

 

Returning to the issue of advisors, we do know that Susan Rice who served as Bill Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs (1997-2001) is one of Obama's top foreign policy advisors. Should he assume the presidency, Rice would likely play a leading role in shaping his Africa policy. There are two interrelated points that need to be made with regards to Rice. First, during the 1994 Rwandan genocide she was director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping at the United States National Security Council. Reflecting on her own inaction during the genocide, Rice is quoted in Samantha Powers' 2001 Atlantic Monthly article, "Bystanders to Genocide", as saying "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required." Second, she is widely acknowledged as a supporter of George W. Bush's Africa Command (AFRICOM). AFRICOM, however, has been so widely unpopular amongst African leaders and their citizenries that the US has been unable to persuade African governments to host it. These two interrelated points are important because they suggest that Rice may be more inclined to pursue a far more direct militarily interventionist policy in Africa than has hitherto been the case. Given her failings during the Rwandan genocide, it is not surprising that Rice has been particularly aggressive on Darfur, only recently scaling back her calls for the use of direct military force in favor of supporting the hybrid United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force.

 

Obama also appears to share Rice's pro-AFRICOM position. He is quoted as saying, "There will be situations that require the United States to work with its partners in Africa to fight terrorism with lethal force. Having a unified command operating in Africa will facilitate this action." At least Obama isn't trying to pass off AFRICOM as a humanitarian initiative, like Bush did when he misleadingly claimed that AFRICOM "will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa," while promoting the "goals of development, health, education, democracy and economic growth." Obama clearly sees it for what it is: the post-9/11 militarization of Africa.

 

For those who feel that the United States fails to intervene when African lives are at stake, an Obama presidency, with Susan Rice leading his African foreign policy team, may offer new hope that when it comes to Africa "never again", no longer means "here we go, again!" For those who feel that US intervention in Africa will never amount to anything more than the securing of its own vital security interests, Obama and Rice may simply be viewed as paving the way for more destructive engagement. One way in which Obama could strike a balance between these two positions is to substantially support internal African peacekeeping efforts. US logistical and financial support to the African Union (AU) would go a long way in strengthening the AU's abilities to successfully intervene in places like Darfur.

 

I am inclined to believe that Obama has good intentions when it comes to Africa, but that it will take a lot more than good intentions to undo and reverse over a half-century of damaging US foreign policy towards Africa. A necessary step in this direction will be his ability to listen to Africans themselves, especially those who continue to fight for democratization, human rights, and control over their own natural resources and economic rights. Fortunately for Obama there are many highly qualified and articulate African and African diaspora scholars who would be more than willing to advise him if he is willing to engage in a dialogue with them.

 

 

‘Son of the Soil?' Pan-Africanism & Third World Prospects in a Possible Obama Presidency By Steve Sharra

 

The exclamatory commentary that has accompanied Barack Obama's ascendancy to the nomination of the Democratic Party's presidential candidate has excited, beneath it, the question of what the nomination itself, and a possible Obama presidency, might mean for the Pan-Africanist world as well as the Third World. While much of the commentary has been laudatory, there have also been cautionary tones, not to mention ambivalent ones. Beyond the excitement, caution and ambivalence of what a possible Obama presidency might entail for Pan-Africa and the Third World, what Obama himself has said in his writing, and has not said, might prove to be revelatory in attempting to explore the discussion that has exercised many minds around the world. We take this exploration by examining some of the issues that have been raised by editorialists and columnists, bloggers and other commentators in Africa and beyond. We also delve into what Obama himself has said in his two best-belling books, as we ponder how the significance of a possible Obama presidency may be realized more in the symbolic transformation of perceptions of race, racism and racial identity in the US and in the world, than in what the office of the US presidency itself is capable or incapable of achieving.

 

First, a word about my use of the terms "Pan-Africa" and "Pan-Africanism." The Pan-Africa I am referring to here is the one that builds on the ideological consciousness of the global historical experiences and identities of people of African descent, and others who share that ideology for political and solidarity purposes. It is a Pan-Africanist consciousness that draws from DuBois's hope, back in 1897, that if Africans were to be a factor in the history of the world, it would have to be through a Pan-African movement. Thus when Ghana became independent from Britain in 1957, Du Bois, unable to attend the epochal occasion due to his passport being impounded by the US government, handed over the mantle of the Pan-Africanist movement to Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, through a letter that he wrote and had delivered to Nkrumah.

 

The 1966 military coup that overthrew Nkrumah as Ghana's president dealt a big blow to a Pan-Africanist movement that had achieved a great deal for people of African descent, especially in Africa. The shared African identity and global consciousness spawned by Pan-Africanist ideology played a key role in mobilizing support amongst African and Third World regions in overthrowing colonialism. In the United States, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King both looked up to the Pan-African world for solidarity in overcoming American racism. With Nkrumah gone, the ideals of Pan-Africanism began atrophying, to the extent that in the 21^st century today there is no discernible movement that concerns itself with the problems that afflict Africa and people of African descent around the world. But there is no question that such a movement is as necessary today as it was in the 1950s and 60s.

 

In his autobiography Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama has demonstrated his awareness of both a Pan-Africanist and Third World consciousness, but for the nationalist demands of American politics today, he has not made that awareness a part of his campaign platform. But those who know Obama's autobiographical instincts in guiding his best judgments know that his upbringing and struggle to identify himself are a core part of who he is. And it is his autobiographical narrative that has appealed to people around the globe. Thus while heeding the call to be cautious in speculating what a possible Obama presidency might do for the Pan-African world, it is worth discussing the extent to which Obama's narrative in itself has the potential to influence new visions and energies in the study of the Pan-African world and its future prospects. Those energies have been on display in many places around the world, not least in Kenya, where Obama's father came from.

 

A June 5^th editorial in The Daily Nation of Kenya, where Obama's father, a Harvard Ph.D., hailed from, offered three reasons as to why Africans were celebrating Obama's victory. The first reason had to do with Obama being "the first African American ever to win nomination to vie for the presidency of the world's sole super-power." Second, Obama was considered "a son of Africa " who has excelled in the world. And thirdly, Obama was "a son of Kenya," since Obama traced "his roots" back to his fatherland, Kenya, in "the present-day Siaya District." The three reasons culminated into one huge hope: Africans were hopeful that "with this win, ‘their son' will implement Africa-friendly policies that could uplift the continent from poverty ."

 

In the June 8^th edition of The Sunday Times of Rwanda, columnist Frank Kagabo also reflected Obama's blood connection to Africa, observing that Obama had "relatives living in third world poverty," a fact which would help African people feel "good and know that nothing is impossible no matter where you come from." In the Malawian parliament, The Daily Times quoted opposition Malawi Congress Party member of parliament Boniface Kadzamira as congratulating Senator Obama , paraphrasing the parliamentarian as saying Malawi was "likely to benefit if he wins the presidential election this August" [sic]. Hon. Kadzamira was also quoted offering a snippet of how Obama's foreign policy might look like "He says he is likely to move away from the policies of sanctions, which has hurt countries like Zimbabwe, to negotiation. He says he will have tough aid conditions and will move away from the weapons of mass destruction to mass reconstruction".

 

The Harvard University-based blog aggregating project, Global Voices Online , housed in the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has been culling blog commentary on the American elections from outside the United States, on a website called Voices Without Votes . Amongst the blogs the website is aggregating is The World Wants Obama Coalition , from where a link to the Caribbean World News announced a news item titled "Caribbean United Behind Obama". Another linked blog, Globamania , sported the self-description, "Because the world believes in real change, too." A round up of Kenyan bloggers by Global Voices author Rebecca Wanjiku was titled "Kenyan bloggers on Kenya's most famous son, Barack Obama ".

 

But even amidst the hopes, adulations and expectations for what a "son of Africa" in the American White House could do for the continent, there have also been voices cautioning the hyped praise, and posing some searching questions. The Daily Nation's editorial mentioned above asked: "But what is there for Africa in the American elections?" It went further still, asking: would Obama manage to "overcome the strong lobby groups that control American foreign policy and that have very little time for Africa?" More unflattering commentary came from Rasna Warah, writing in the June 9^th edition of The Daily Nation, who wielded a sharp knife over the blood ties everyone was happy to evoke. Warah's title was upfront and blunt: "We cannot lay claims on Obama; he's not one of us ". Warah went on to state: "What everyone seems to be forgetting is that Barack Obama is an American, not a Kenyan. His roots may lie in Kenya, but he was born and raised in the United States, and his loyalty lies with that nation, not with ours."

 

As evidence for her argument, Warah cited Obama's own words spoken when he visited Kenya as a United States Senator, in August of 2006. She quoted Obama as saying: "As a US Senator, my country and other nations have an obligation and self-interest in being full partners with Kenya and Africa . And I will do my part to shape an intelligent foreign policy that promotes peace and prosperity." As for Obama's autobiography Dreams From my Father, which Obama wrote after returning from Kenya and going to Harvard Law School, Warah suggested that "curiosity about his roots" was the real reason Obama visited his fatherland for the first time ever, in the summer of 1988. It was "not deep love for this country," said Warah.

 

By far the most authoritative statement of caution if not negation came from Dr. Makau Mutua, Dean and University Distinguished Professor of Law at State University of New York at Buffalo, and chair of the Kenyan Human Rights Commission. Writing in the Daily Nation of June 5^th , Dr. Mutua started out by quipping that the reaction to Obama's clinching of the Democratic nomination was as if Obama was "poised to become" the president of Kenya, or indeed Africa. The reasons, Dr. Mutua said, were three-fold: "national, racial, and ethnic pride that a black man can become ‘king' of the empire." Dr. Mutua then set out to demolish the expectations edifice by pointing out "the nature of the US as a state, and the character of the American presidency" as the reasons why he was urging caution to the hype of what Obama would do for the continent. Dr. Mutua contrasted between the way Africans and Americans see the office of the president as being responsible for the mounting expectations on Obama. "Africans think of presidents as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent", wrote Dr. Mutua, saying that in Africa that perception gave the president enormous powers which ultimately determined what citizens could gain or lose. It was what created what Dr. Mutua called "tribal barons." Not so with American politics, in which "the American presidency is a highly circumscribed office that is subject to larger national interests on which there is consensus about the purpose of government."

 

What would prevent a President Obama from being helpful to Africa then were the two core functions of the American presidency: to "develop and implement a foreign policy to enhance US interests and pursue a domestic policy that will bring economic prosperity to the nation." It was in the service of those two functions that America's role in the world had been historically shaped, and continued to be, limiting the scope of what an individual president could do, even as he or she brought his or her personality and individuality to what is considered the most powerful leadership position in the world. Here Dr. Mutua went deeper than anybody has been daring to, to expose America as an empire whose wealth and might have been built on a foundation that has dialectically entailed the exploitation and destruction of Africa. "Why am I pessimistic about the prospects of an Obama presidency for Africa?" asked Dr. Mutua. The answer, he offered, lay in Africa's "structurally racist and exploitative relationship with Africa. In slavery - the brutal capture, transportation, sale and exploitation of Africans to build America - and the support by the United States of Cold War despots in Africa, lies the destructive relationship between black people and America."

 

As an analytical insight, Dr. Mutua's explanation went to the heart of a historical truth that has largely been avoided by most commentators, including Obama's own positioning of himself vis-a-viz his identity. "It is partly because of these traumas," explained Dr. Mutua, "that Africa is so underdeveloped and marginalised in global politics. That is why to America Africa has either been an afterthought or an object of pity and charity. It would require an ideological shift by the US to change its relationship with Africa to base it on equality, fair trade and investment, and a voice for Africans in global institutions." As such, no individual American president can achieve the kind of paradigm shift that would turn around America's image of Africa: "These are not steps that a president can take alone because they affect fundamental American interests, and would call for a realignment of US foreign policy so that it is not simply Eurocentric."

 

Dr. Mutua's realistic analysis of what the American presidency looks like and how its foreign and domestic policy mandates shape the scope and limits of what the American presidency can achieve points to an important distinction that has to be made between the president as an individual and the president as an institution. As an individual, we only have to hark back to Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father. As I pointed out in my recent blog article on Obama, the personal importance of Africa to Barack Obama is not only evident in the book, it is profound to Obama's own identity. The way Obama treats Kenya in Dreams From My Father leaves us in no doubt about this. In the book, Obama takes 450 pages to offer an intimate look into his life, from early days in Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, to an epochal homecoming in Kenya. The amount of detail Obama dedicates to his life in the United States and Indonesia, where he lived all his life hitherto, contrasts sharply with the one third of the book that he devotes to Kenya, where he only spent three months. His days at Harvard Law School are given a mere two sentences (p. 437).

 

Contrary to Rasna Warah's suggestion that Obama went to Kenya more out of curiosity than love of the country, the answer to Obama's deep search for identity is finally consummated and revealed in Kenya, right from the moment he steps foot on the soil. It is worth reproducing, again, the paragraph that puts Obama's quest for identity to rest, when somebody recognizes his name in an instant:

 

"That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A., or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people's memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, ‘Oh, you are so and so's son.' No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand" (p. 305).

 

However the reasons for caution in imagining what an Obama presidency may do for Africa and the Third World are equally sobering. By the time we get to the US senate and to his next book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), Africa has pretty much disappeared from Obama's narrative, replaced by distant references that characterize much of mainstream Western attitudes about Africa. Missing even from the Index, Africa is mentioned only perfunctorily, no longer as the place Obama spent a lifetime yearning for, but rather as the known poster child for the world's worst maladies and disorder. "There are times when considering the plight of Africa-the millions racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of twelve-year-old guerillas who know nothing but war wielding machetes or AK-47s-I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair" (p. 319). But Obama is also aware of the progress Africa has made, citing Uganda's success with the AIDS pandemic, and the end of civil war in countries like Mozambique. He observes that "there are positive trends in Africa often hidden in the news of despair, while at the same time clinging to an Afropessimism that warns: "We should not expect to help Africa if Africa ultimately proves unwilling to help itself" (ibid.).

 

Obama is also able to go beyond the average politician in his candidness about the ravages brought on Indonesia and other parts of the world by the ideological juggernaut of US foreign policy. In a chapter titled "The World Beyond Our Borders," Obama dwells on how Indonesians find it puzzling that "most Americans can't locate Indonesia on a map," given the role that US foreign policy has played in the fate of Indonesia "for the past 60 years" (p. 272). Providing a brief historical account of this role, Obama describes how the CIA provided "covert support to various insurgencies inside Indonesia, and cultivated close links with Indonesia's military officers, many of whom had been trained in the United States" (p. 273). The military then went ahead and "began a massive purge of communists and their sympathizers," leading somewhere between 500,000 and one million deaths, "with 750,000 others imprisoned or forced into exile" (ibid.).

 

Obama's candor continues throughout the chapter, noting that "our record is mixed-not just in Indonesia but across the world" (p. 280). He calls American foreign policy "a jumble of warring impulses," at times farsighted and serving the mutual interests of both the United States and other nations, and at other times making "for a more dangerous world" (ibid.). His take on Iran ought to be enlightening in light of the current saber-rattling and familiar drum beat toward another a possible military strike: "Occasionally, U.S. covert operations would engineer the removal of democratically elected leaders in countries like-with seismic repercussions that haunt us to this day" (p. 286). Yet Obama is no dogmatic ideologue, finding himself "in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan's worldview" in debates with friends on the left. He charges that progressives were eager to indict US complicity in the brutalities that took place in Chile, yet were less so in criticizing oppression in the communist bloc. Nor was he persuaded that US corporations and global trade "were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people" (p. 289).

 

Needless to say, such candor is as rare amongst US politicians as is knowledge of what US foreign policy has been up to around the world, in the general populace, according to several writers and thinkers, including John Perkins, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Carl Mirra, Stephen Hiatt, amongst others. Many of these thinkers have also pointed out how while some Third World leaders are indeed corrupt, Western multinational corporations, backed by a deliberate, strategic foreign policy, create the very infrastructure that facilitates the corruption, and are actually corrupt themselves. According to Perkins, Hiatt, Patrick Bond, John Christiansen, Amit Basole, Leonce Ndikumana, James Boyce, among others, this is done through debt ensnaring, off-shore tax havens, trade mispricing, and dubious advice from the IMF and the World Bank, whose complicity with foreign policy and multinational corporate interests has led to trillions of dollars being emptied out of Third World countries and poured into Western economies. This is the corruption and the looting of the Third World that has best been captured by John Perkins' term "corporatocracy" in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Stephen Hiatt's 2007 edited collection of essays, A Game As Old As Empire shows how pervasive the nexus of economic hitmen has become, and how closely aligned the system is between foreign policy and corporate interests.

 

In the final analysis, the significance of an Obama presidency for Pan-Africa and the Third World will lie less in what Barack Obama may or may not be able to do for people of African descent than in the symbolic message that his ascendancy to the most powerful office in the world will do in changing black people's perceptions of who they are in the world, and how others view them. That has been the underlying, implicit cause of the renewed hope in what has been said by the Kenyans, the Malawians, the South Africans, the Nigerians, Caribbean commentators, and in fact every one else around the world who has joined in the celebration. While the office of the US presidency may limit Obama's actual impact on Pan-Africa and the Third World, as Dr. Mutua warns, the symbolic importance of the achievement is what has the potential to go much further in offering a paradigm shift in the self-perception of a people whose destiny, according to Frantz Fanon, represents the possibility to refashion a new vision for the world, one beyond the limits set by European rationality and the consequences, both good and bad, that the Third World has reaped there from.

 

For that to happen, Obama's own notion of what race and racism still mean in today's America and how some minorities are overcoming it could shine some light on the path this transformation might take. Obama devotes a chapter in The Audacity of Hope to the topic of race, in which he offers both a stinging and sensitive portrayal of the bane of America's ethnic identity, as well as the prospects of what can be achieved in breaking down racial barriers. Obama's philosophy of race indict residual and institutional racism, but also celebrate white people and black people alike who are able to overcome the vice and chart a new path for society. Those lessons ought to apply not only to America, but to the rest of the world as well, in the apt description of the global face of Obama's extended family as a miniature portrait of the world:

 

"As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who's half Indonesian but who's usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and a niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I've never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe" (p. 231).

 

 

Will Obama Respond to Black Demands? How African Americans could reshape American politics By James Thindwa

 

Barack Obama's ascendancy as leader of the Democratic Party and the likely next president of the United States raises interesting and complicated questions for the Pan-African world. Can he balance the urgent needs of Africa and the rest of the black world with the imperative to tackle the deepening economic crisis in the U.S.? How far can he go in prioritizing the crisis-ridden Pan African world without provoking a backlash at home, especially from forces bent on undermining his presidency? What forces in the black world are best positioned to give shape to a progressive Obama foreign policy? In other words, to whom will Obama feel accountable on the question of U.S. policies towards Africa and the rest of the Pan African world?

 

By happenstance, the Democratic primaries have bestowed a not insignificant amount of clout on African Americans. Having tried to run an election that transcended race, in effect treating it as a non-issue, Obama was awakened to the intractability of race as an enduring reality of American politics. Triggered by the Iowa primary results, which signaled the possibility of a first serious black presidential candidacy, this awakening forever changed the dynamics of the election for Obama. Nationally and in Iowa, significant numbers of black voters had actually favored Hillary Clinton. But when Obama took Iowa, whose black population is only 2.7 percent, all bets were off. Following the nail-biter loss to Clinton in New Hampshire, South Carolina's black voters, with their newfound confidence in Obama-and aided by Bill Clinton's racially tinged "Jesse Jackson" comment-helped Obama recover his momentum. This South Carolina moment, and the historically indispensable role of African Americans in putting Democratic presidents in the White House, makes Obama indebted to the most progressive and important constituency of the Democratic Party. The question is whether the black community will be organized and mobilized in large enough numbers to effectively stake its claim.

 

So, what will African Americans demand from Obama? The problems and issues facing Black America are plenty and daunting. Racism continues to shape black life, and is implicated in every major issue that impedes black progress: lack of health care, joblessness, crime, youth gangs, police brutality, race-driven mass incarceration, homelessness, the home mortgage crisis, under-funded schools, teenage pregnancy, gun violence and much more. These and other problems not only impose a heavy burden on black civil society, but they also undermine the ability of African Americans to engage in outside struggles involving American foreign policy and impacting the Black Diaspora.

 

The Iraq War is the most obvious example. Since the Iraq War began in 2003, there has been a shocking absence of black voices in the effort to stop it. One reason is the preoccupation of many community leaders with local struggles involving the aforementioned issues. Paradoxically, the Iraq War itself, which is siphoning $12 billion per month, has exacerbated these very problems. This war is the great elephant in the room. If it is not brought to a stop, the black community will not be able to address many of these issues. Furthermore, African Americans will continue to have little influence in a host of other important struggles it should care about: Zimbabwe, Darfur, the DRC, Somalia and Ethiopia, Kenya election, climate change, and so on.

 

It is a great paradox of this historical moment that Black America will need to revive its legendary, good ol' fashioned grassroots organizing to compel a black president, whose very existence is the ultimate symbol racial progress-to carry out the unfinished business of the civil rights movement. One of the first demands the black community must make on Obama is an immediate end to the Iraq War and the reprioritization of domestic and global economic and humanitarian needs. These issues are also a matter of national security for the U.S. African American leaders will need to take up this challenge. They can no longer stand on the sidelines. If they cannot join preexisting anti-war forces, they need to mobilize within their own communities. Pressure must be brought to bear on the Congressional Black Caucus to take on a more visible leadership role. Local community groups must compel their congressional representatives to become national leaders and spokespeople in the effort to end the war. Black churches and Mosques and other places of worship need to make ending this war a priority.

 

Such involvement will reap other important benefits. Anti-war leadership and activism can facilitate the emergence of new leaders and help revive and strengthen veteran leaders. It will also create opportunities for African American leaders to intersect with and forge new alliances with African, Caribbean, Central and South American counterparts, as well progressive forces in Europe who yearn for a new, mature and forward looking United States. In other words the internationalization of the anti-war movement, evident in 2003 at the beginning of the war, must the revived. But this time, the African American community, which remains the most progressive and anti-war constituency in the U.S., must be engaged. It must use its newfound leverage to force Obama to act.

 

In addition to the distortions caused by the Iraq War, such as neglect of key domestic and international obligations, African Americans and progressive forces across the world have another important reason to end it. The war is enabling the neo-liberal agenda and making it more difficult for progressive forces to challenge its dominance in global politics. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the "War on Terror" have helped fuel privatization, deregulation and anti-labor activities in all three countries and beyond. The war is hurting on two fronts: a) the $12 billion-per-month hemorrhaging has imposed a heavy burden on local communities who must struggle to meet the needs of vulnerable citizens, b) anti-war activism it is sapping critical civic energies needed to combat the very effects of neo-liberalism. In addition to the war, activists are pushing back against budget cuts, privatization, deregulation and the impact of profit-driven trade agreements such NAFTA and CAFTA, including increased immigration. They are pressuring local governments to fund basic needs in health, education and housing; fighting to restore constitutional rights jettisoned under the guise of national security; and defending immigrants increasingly under attack by ICE and violent vigilantes. Labor unions, whose presence in all these struggles is crucial, are bogged down in their own protracted struggles against employers who want to gut wages and benefits, and to restore the very right to organize-a right deemed threatening to the profit imperative of neo-liberalism.

 

Obama himself will need to understand that none of what he wants to accomplish for his country and for the Pan African world will be possible until the Iraq War is ended. The anti-war forces in the U.S. must figure out a new strategy for engaging the new president. This time, they must seize the opportunity to build a multi-racial anti-war coalition that has a real chance to shake up Congress and the new administration. African Americans must forge coalitions with allies across the global to take on the Iraq War and challenge hyper-capitalism. They must refuse to the taken for granted by the Democratic Party once again. This time they will have a stronger case to make. They will have played a pivotal role (in primaries and the general) in the election of the first real black president of the United States of America. African American should not squander the opportunity to cash in their "South Carolina voucher."

 

 

The (Racial) Politics of Symbols and the Crisis of Democracy in America By Corey D. B. Walker

 

In politics, symbols matter. And in a nation with a history of racialized chattel slavery, state sanctioned discrimination, and an anti-black racialist and racist culture, political symbols of racial progress matter tremendously.

 

It is in this context where the effusive praise of the ascendancy of Senator Barack Obama to the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency of the United States must be understood. By capturing a major party nomination, Senator Obama stands as a potent symbol of progress for the American experiment with democracy that continues to be plagued by its racial past that is still very much a part of its present.

 

But to equate the symbolic dimension of Senator Obama's campaign for the presidency with the substantive standing and status of American democracy is to commit a serious error.

 

When one begins to critically examine the contemporary moment in American democratic development, we should pause in light of several deep and disturbing trends that have become prominent since the decline of the Black Freedom struggles of the 1960s. And, since Senator Obama is not running for president of a union local but for the highest political position in the United States, it is at the intersection of symbol and substance where we should critically confront the crisis of democracy in America.

 

The last eight years of the Bush-Cheney regime is often seen as an anomaly in contemporary American political development. Perpetual geopolitical and class warfare has been a hallmark of this regime's politics along with a severe contraction of institutional accountability and democratic responsibility.

 

Although the current political regime was able to effectively exploit the opening presented by the tragic events of 11 September 2001 for the advancement of their id[th]eological worldview, the option to do so did not appear only at that moment. The Bush-Cheney regime was able to commence their rogue politics due to, among other things, the fact that they assumed political power at a moment in American political life that was deeply structure by the institutionalization of a conservative political philosophy, the intensification of neoliberal ideology, the globalization of a vicious speculative finance capitalism, the massive reorganization of the American military-industrial complex, and the legitimation of the American police-incarceral state.

 

It is this political apparatus and its theoretical infrastructure that we must critically confront and engage when we assess the potential and substance of Senator Obama's presidential campaign.

 

What this means is that we must comprehend how and in what ways the structural limitations of the political in the United States enforces a severe discipline on the actions, ideologies, and strategies of politicians and of politics. Thus, although Senator Obama's nomination represents yet another first in American political life, it is far from being a fundamental transformative event of the very institutional and theoretical structure of democracy in America.

 

The forces and interests that have molded American political institutions and culture in the last half of the twentieth century have created a style of democratic politics that thrives on a low level of support and involvement by the public while maximizing the power and presence of capital along with a new class of political intellectuals, technicians, and elites. Such a low intensity politics thrives on the mobilization of symbols while marginalizing the life chances of the majority of citizens. It is the confluence of the (racial) politics of symbols and an ideology of progress that causes and supports the theoretical and political confusions that inhibit any formulation of a critique of the crisis of democracy in America.

 

To be sure, Senator Obama's political philosophy and policy proposals represent the very centrist positions that have captured the Democratic Party as a response to the fundamental reorganization of American political life by the conservatism of capital and culture. For instance, Senator Obama's economic team is heavily tilted in favor of neoliberal economists and free marketers who, despite being a bit chastened by the "excesses" of global capitalism over the past decade, fundamentally believe in the inherent good of free markets, free flow of capital, and free exercise of business with little or no government regulation.

 

Despite the smooth veneer offered by the rhetoric of dialogue and diplomacy, Senator Obama's foreign policy vision is still one wedded to the expansion and deepening of American Empire. Thus, we should not be surprised when we do not hear new and progressive pronouncements on Middle East policy - particularly when such pronouncements lack any deep probing and new ideas regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Latin American policy - particularly when such pronouncements offer only the continuation of the US imperial stance against Cuba and the desire to thwart the socialist alternative offered by Venezuela - and US security policy - particularly when such pronouncements are in favor of increased US troop strength, offer (qualified) support for the option for US unilateral action, and support for the newest arm of US imperialism in Africa, Africa Command (AFRICOM).

 

While the presidential campaign of Senator Obama has elicited responses ranging from unqualified support by his most fervent supporters to a critical support offered by some on the left, it has indeed been the symbol of Senator Obama as a major party presidential candidate that has garnered the most attention and political commentary in the current presidential election cycle.

 

"Imperialism," John Bellamy Fosters advises, "is not simply a policy but a systematic reality." Indeed, symbols matter. But in politics, symbols are not the only things that matter.