Obama and African American Paradoxes

I illustrate a “double life” in offering my opinion: in this blog I focus on national topics; on other areas, occasionally I concentrate on the unsettled “ethnic-racial” theme.

A short time ago in Cartagena the First Latin American Meeting took place: “African descendents in the Americas Agenda.” For courtesy of El Universal, I served the assistants, at breakfast the first morning, the following paragraphs, a little denser, under the title New African Agenda with Obama?

As follows:

Is it possible to continue to reflect over the blacks in the Americas without referring to the significance of Barack Obama? With difficulty. What connection does Obama have with the intellectual and political tradition of the Afro American movement? Very little.

And here comes the paradox: What strengthens us seems strange to us? Better yet, the challenge: How to think about a new afro descendent agenda in the Americas in relation to the time in which Obama has been inaugurated?

Thanks to globalization, societies with a minority of African descendents are going to have to live up to the standard Obama has set in place. Something like “the race for exception.” It is the race argument, only exceptionally.

But, the question is, how to fight for the black race if it is advised not to mention race and not to say that you are fighting for the black race? For those who think it is not possible, a good response is: African Americans believe it is, and because of this 90% are going to vote for Obama.

And here arises another paradox: the major electoral mobilization motivated by skin color, race, has created the post-racial era in politics in a society profoundly marked by race.

It is necessary to assimilate this Obama standard in order to have a viable Afro agenda, especially in societies where skin color, at least in the twentieth century, did not have such radical consequences as in the United States.

Said assimilation is going to be torturous, even if a new leader appears whose language is the “standard of the race for exception.” Certainly, it is necessary to begin to modify the language in use, whether or not the beliefs continue to lag behind.

The “African diaspora,” this name calling meant to make them feel uprooted from Africa three centuries later, should be reinterpreted in light of the death of panafricanism, the idea of a State for all of Africa and its diasporas.

One thing is a meeting of the “African diaspora”, and another is “a meeting of the black citizens and of African descendents of different nations of the Americas.”

The diaspora should yield to the nation or homeland, the prominent place in the imagination of the Afro movement. Otherwise, we are going to continue to be tributaries, some times little awareness, of a political project based on race, when what is necessary is the integration of a political project based on the nation.

Integration is the key word. What Obama has done is come to lead the “American dream,” perhaps the ideal form of “integration.” The dream that Martin Luther King beautifully re-described in terms of equality, liberty, humanity and justice in the “red hills of Georgia.”

But integration means compromise, in the sense of obligations with others, derivatives of what is possible to do or change in a society. Integration is an intense dialog that compromises.

And this is not a paradox: the “Afro agenda” is going to be more ambitious and viable, while at the same time more integrated in the national agenda.

Obama will not be the Messiah of the blacks in the Americas, not even in his America.

Here we can wait for some white initiative of “Afro progress in the Americas,” and over there pride to get this great nation off the ground and come close to a dream. Enough.