Colors of Stars

In America of course, but also all over the world, no doubt nothing will be the same: inspiring for some, vaguely disturbing or worrisome for others, such is the emotion that hasn’t stopped beating in billions of humans these days. The feeling will survive the official and definitive result of the U.S. presidential election, no matter what (and that’s the most extraordinary part).

For us, nothing American has ever been irrelevant. Big or little in effect, all the peoples of the earth have always felt affected, from near or far, by the consequences of that electoral carnival, spread out at great cost across months of frenzied campaign, reprised every four years by the world’s leading political, military, and economic power. Then what should we make of an election, historic in every way, unfolding against the background of the international financial calamity and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that on top of it all could only lead to one or another of two astonishing firsts: a Black in the White House; or else a United States vice president in petticoats?

In the weeks to come, the experts will work feverishly on the positions of the new American administration, whether it’s market crises, foreign policy, the fight against terrorism, energy policy, or the environment. The fact remains that we’re the witnesses to an extraordinary change, a veritable revolution that didn’t have to wait for the verdict of the ballots to get started. In a country where racial segregation was widely practiced just a half-century ago, and that is still far from having chased out all its demons, in effect a mulatto dared to reclaim a royal slice of the American Dream, even if he refrained from presenting himself as the candidate of the African-American people, even if many Blacks criticized his lack of assertiveness. The fact remains that breaking with tradition, snubbing more than one of its own icons, the Democratic Party itself dared to make Obama its champion. And to finish, tens of millions of voters dared to take their option to the finish in bringing him their votes.

In and of itself, all that is enormous. And all that will be duly considered in the four corners of the earth, sparking questions and fears here, reviving frustrations and stimulating hope there. So it’s not just out of repulsion for all that the Republican McCain represents in their eyes that the Cuban Fidel Castro, the Venezuelan Chavez and the Bolivian Morales declared their sympathy for his adversary, born of an American-Kenyan union. A Black will someday run a European country, even if it’s probably not tomorrow, the only member of the British government of African descent predicted a few days ago. And it’s the same global wave of Obamania that drove a North African secretary of the French Socialist Party yesterday to call for ethno-cultural diversity at the head of the left, and not just in the soccer stadium or the rap scene.

One more time, it was in reality during the electoral campaign that a page of history was written that will weigh heavily on the future of the United States and, by ricochet, the rest of the world. America is where globalization started. What no one had imagined was the slow, arduous globalization of humankind.