Black

Skin color is not a program. Barack Obama is a rather handsome man, with a smile that, so they say, is irresistible, an eloquence that carries you away, a charming wife, millions of dollars collected by an army of volunteers. He learned–-doubtless remembering the lessons of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela on this point-–to address himself just as much to white America as to black America. “I have a dream.” These words of an assassinated pastor are shared in the human consciousness, just like those of Mandela from his imprisonment in Long Island aimed at President de Klerk to end apartheid: “Mr. de Klerk, we have a shared problem.” It seems Barack Obama has succeeded in this and perhaps will be, for this and other reasons, the next president of the United States.

Skin color is not a program, but the nomination of the Illinois senator–-born to a Kenyan father and a mother born in Kansas-–as the Democratic Party presidential candidate in the biggest world power is a significant event; his election would be a date in the history of men, not only in the United States. Hardly a half-century ago, a black woman, Rosa Parks, by refusing to give up her seat to a White in an Atlanta bus, was at the origins of a civil rights movement. In the cinema, Scarlett, the charming Scarlett of Gone With the Wind, was scolding her faithful black slave while smiling: “Watch out, you will have the whip…” “Oh no, Miss Scarlett.”

How many terrible stakes set aflame by the Ku Klux Klan, how many hanged, tortured, how many men and women in chains for centuries, crammed into ship holds, registered in the books of commerce as merchandise, subjected on plantations to the worst that man can imagine when he wanted to convince himself that the slave man, woman and child are not his fellow human beings but his possessions? For a long time, Blacks were not people.

At the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico the image of two black athletes raising their gloved fists on the winners’ podium traveled around the world, but never again could they go back over the past. Blacks, from slaves, became boxers, 100-meter runners, jazzmen–-since they were granted “the sense of rhythm”-–actors, sometimes in the role of the fool. President of the United States, not yet. Can it only be measured, today, what this election would represent for millions of young people in American cities and in ours, in the countries of Africa under the yoke of debt? What it would represent for what one could call the black curse to be lifted, so much has it scarred the consciousness and that, it must be remembered, was not divine, but racial and economic. Throughout the world, little black girls in general prefer white and blond dolls as gifts. And what if that was changing?

But skin color, it is true, is not a program. American Democrats are sometimes further to the right than the French right. However, Obama’s proposals are not the same as McCain’s. Universal health insurance, raising taxes for the richest… He is not calling into question capitalism, that is certain. Are we better off? In foreign policy besides, some of his recent positions are worrying.

Jean-Luc Godard once said, in essence, that he would believe in cultural diversity when he was able to hate a bad film from Turkey, Azerbaijan, or wherever, the same as a bad American film. Maybe we will be able to believe in some amount of progress in human history when we can criticize, if necessary, the politics of a black president with the same strength as a white president.