The US is getting more and more like Brazil every day...except Brazil is nowhere near close to electing its first Black (or half-Black) president

Viewpoint: Is Barack Obama black?
By Kimberly McClain Dacosta
Harvard University

Is Obama black? It depends on who - and when - you ask.

For some of us, the heralding of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States seems a rather uncontroversial claim.

Obama isn't black. 'Black,' in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves Debra Dickerson Colorblind, Salon.com January 2007

Not so for others. One well-known African American writer, Debra Dickerson, famously objected to calling Obama black arguing that because he is not descended from slaves, he is not of the people properly defined as "black."

Ergo, he is not black - at all.

The bulk of the people protesting against references to Obama as a black man, however, grant that he is "part" black (by way of his father), but assert that because he also has a white mother it is not "accurate" to call him black. He he is "in fact" mixed-race, they say.

Opposing arguments

My first reaction to questions about the "correctness" or "accuracy" of Obama's racial classification is to undermine the premise of the question itself. The search for the "correctness" of racial identity presumes that a definitive answer can be found.

Barack Obama lived for many years with his white grandparents

It presumes that race is a real entity, something fixed, or natural. It seems to deny what scholars have laboured for decades to demonstrate - that the criteria used to classify people in racial categories, the categories used in a given society, and the uses to which those categories are put - vary by place and time. They are, as academics are fond of saying, "socially constructed".

Yet the predilections of the scholar fail to satisfy those who claim to know what race Obama "is", for these are really statements about what the speaker thinks he ought to be.

When people insist that Obama "is" black, they point to his self-identification as such, and the assertion that when most people look at him, they see a black man.

VIEWPOINTS Kimberly McClain DaCosta is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Social Studies at Harvard and the author of Making Multiracials: State, Family and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line Nancy Giles: Time to smile

Calling him "black" seems to acknowledge the connection between his rise and the struggles of a people.

When others argue that Obama "is" mixed-race, they point to the fact that he has a white mother, not only a black father, and was raised in an interracial family.

Calling him "mixed-race" seems to acknowledge that family, offering a corrective to centuries of denying our tangled genealogies.

De-stigmatisation

What I find most interesting about the question of what racial label to assign Obama, is that we are asking the question at all.

As recently as 20 years ago, the question of Obama's racial position would be presumed settled before it was even asked.

Obama's Kenyan grandmother, Mama Sarah, will attend his inauguration

In keeping with the one-drop rule - the practice of categorising as black anyone with any known African ancestry - Obama's identification as a black person would be expected, accepted and unremarkable.

The person suggesting that Obama be classified as mixed-race would quite likely have been met with suspicion or a confused look ("What's that?") since for most of US history, in most places, mixed-race identity has not been collectively recognised.

In the last 20 years, however, the collective efforts of mixed-race people in the US to de-stigmatise interracial families and garner public recognition of mixed race identity have been fairly successful (for example, the US government now enumerates mixed race identities).

Stares

Even so, the question whether Obama is black or mixed-race reflects a basic misunderstanding of the experience of those of us who have grown up in interracial families, particularly those of us of African descent, born in the post-Civil Rights period.

Many of us forged a black identity, one that was not at odds with being mixed-race, but arose out of our experiences as mixed people

We (I have an African American father and an Irish American mother) were raised on the front lines of racial change, where the new rules about interracial intimacy often clashed with the old - both in public and in our own families.

The affection we were so comfortable showing our white mothers at home drew stares, and worse, from both whites and blacks in public.

It was in our families where we first felt love and protection as well as the first sting of racial prejudice.

And many of us forged a black identity, one that was not at odds with being mixed-race, but arose out of our experiences as mixed people: from an awareness that the racial dilemma we were born into has its deepest roots in anti-black prejudice.

For us, being black and mixed-race are not mutually exclusive. We have learned to live with the contradictions.

Perhaps it's time for everyone else to learn to live with them too.

Obama and the Promise of Education

http://www.truthout.org/111608A
Henry Giroux, Truthout: "Needless to say, like many Americans, I am both delighted and cautious about Barack Obama's election. Symbolically, this is an unprecedented moment in the fight against the legacy of racism while at the same time offering new possibilities for addressing how racism works in a post-Bush period."

The Moose Stops Here

By NY Times Op-Ed Columnist

FRANK RICH

Published: November 16, 2008

The post-election Republican soul searching has featured a convenient amnesia about the party’s race-based “Southern strategy.”

ELECTION junkies in acute withdrawal need suffer no longer. Though the exciting Obama-McCain race is over, the cockfight among the losers has only just begun. The conservative crackup may be ugly, but as entertainment, it’s two thumbs up!

Over at Fox News, Greta Van Susteren has been trashing the credibility of her own network’s chief political correspondent, Carl Cameron, for his report on Sarah Palin’s inability to identify Africa as a continent, while Bill O’Reilly valiantly defends Cameron’s honor. At Slate, a post-mortem of conservative intellectuals descended into name-calling, with the writer Ross Douthat of The Atlantic labeling the legal scholar Douglas Kmiec a “useful idiot.”

In an exuberant class by himself is Michael Barone, a ubiquitous conservative commentator who last week said that journalists who trash Palin (more than a few of them conservatives) do so because “she did not abort her Down syndrome baby.” He was being “humorous,” he subsequently explained to Politico, though the joke may be on him. Barone writes for U.S. News & World Report, where his 2008 analyses included keepers like “Just Call Her Sarah ‘Delano’ Palin.” Just call it coincidence, but on Election Day, word spread that the once-weekly U.S. News was downsizing to a monthly — a step closer to the fate of Literary Digest, the weekly magazine that vanished two years after its straw poll predicted an Alf Landon landslide over Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936.

Will the 2008 G.O.P. go the way of the 1936 G.O.P., which didn’t reclaim the White House until 1952? Even factoring in the Democrats’ time-honored propensity for self-immolation, it’s not beyond reason. The Republicans are in serious denial. A few heretics excepted, they hope to blame all their woes on their unpopular president, the inept McCain campaign and their party’s latent greed for budget-busting earmarks.

The trouble is far more fundamental than that. The G.O.P. ran out of steam and ideas well before George W. Bush took office and Tom DeLay ran amok, and it is now more representative of 20th-century South Africa during apartheid than 21st-century America. The proof is in the vanilla pudding. When David Letterman said that the 10 G.O.P. presidential candidates at an early debate looked like “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club,” he was the first to correctly call the election.

On Nov. 4, that’s roughly the sole constituency that remained loyal to the party — minus its wealthiest slice, a previously solid G.O.P. stronghold that turned blue this year (in a whopping swing of 34 percentage points). The Republicans lost every region of the country by double digits except the South, which they won by less than double digits (9 points). They took the South only because McCain, who ran roughly even with Obama among whites in every other region, won Southern whites by 38 percentage points.

Those occasional counties that tilted more Republican in 2008 tended to be not only the least diverse, but also the most rural, least educated and slowest-growing in population. McCain-Palin did score a landslide among white evangelical Christians, though even in that demographic Obama shaved the G.O.P. margin by seven percentage points from 2004.

The Republicans did this to themselves, yet a convenient amnesia can be found in conservatives’ post-Election Day soul searching. There’s endless hand-wringing about Bush and McCain blunders and Abramoff-Stevens corruption, but there’s barely any mention of the nasty cultural brawls that defined the G.O.P. campaign narrative this year as the party clung bitterly once more to its 40-year-old “Southern strategy.”

There were as many Republican prejudices as candidates. In primary season, the whispered antipathy among some conservative evangelicals toward Mormons grew so loud that Mitt Romney felt compelled to give a speech defending his faith (but was so fearful of inciting further wrath that he said the word Mormon only once). The conservative gatekeeper Michael Medved spotlighted another whisper campaign in May, writing that the popular moderate Florida G.O.P. governor Charlie Crist had been “single since his divorce in 1980 (after a marriage that lasted only a year)” and was the subject of “nasty rumors of possible gay activity.” Crist announced his engagement to a woman weeks later, but by then he was no longer a serious contender for the ticket.

John McCain also might have held Florida had he prevailed with his first choice of a running mate, the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman, but G.O.P. ayatollahs scuttled both him and the abortion moderate Tom Ridge, who might have helped win Pennsylvania. Not that McCain was innocent in these exclusionary escapades. He strenuously sought the endorsement of the Rev. John Hagee, even though Hagee had blamed gays for Hurricane Katrina, referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “the great whore,” and theorized that Hitler came about because God’s “top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”

The icing on this rancid cake was the race-baiting of Obama and the immigrant bashing by G.O.P. hopefuls who tried to outdo the nativist fringe candidate Tom Tancredo. Yet Republican denial is unabated. In an interview with Palin the weekend before the election, a conservative Wall Street Journal editorialist asked whether “the G.O.P. doesn’t in fact have a perception problem, that it is no longer viewed as a big tent.” A perception problem? Hello — how about a reality problem?

Yet the G.O.P. really does believe that it’s all about perception. That’s why its 2000 convention offered a stage full of break dancers and gospel singers, wildly outnumbering the black delegates in the audience. Bush and Karl Rove regarded diversity as a public-relations issue to be finessed with marketing. Round up some black extras! Sell “compassionate conservatism” by posing Bush incessantly with black schoolchildren! Problem solved!

The 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign Web site even boasted a “Compassion” archive of photos of Bush with black folk, including Colin Powell. McCain used the same playbook this year, when he headed south to emote over Katrina victims and stock his own Web site with pictures depicting his adventures in black America. He had been a no-show in New Orleans during the six months after the hurricane hit, when his presence might have made a difference.

In defeat, the party’s thinking remains unchanged. Its leaders once again believe they can bamboozle the public into thinking they’re the “party of Lincoln” by pushing forward a few minority front men or women. The reason why they are promoting Palin and the recently elected Indian-American governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, as the party’s “future” is not just that they are hard-line social conservatives; they are also the only prominent Republican officeholders under 50 who are not white men. The G.O.P. will have to dip down to a former one-term lieutenant governor of Maryland, Michael Steele, to put a black public face on its national committee.

Such window dressing aside, there remains only one Republican idea for reaching out to minority voters: Richard Land, of the Southern Baptist Convention, recommends pandering to socially conservative blacks and Hispanics with yet more hyperventilation about same-sex marriage. Weird though it may be, gays were the sole minority group that actually voted slightly more Republican this year (though still going Democratic by 70 to 27 percent). Pitting blacks and Latinos against them could open up a whole new bloody front in the G.O.P. civil war.

The only other widespread post-election conservative ideas are Bush 2000 retreads (market-based health care and education reform). Jindal offers generic gab about how the party must offer Americans “real solutions” and “substance,” but he has yet to offer a real solution to his own state’s gaping $1 billion budget shortfall. Indeed, the only two “new” ideas that the G.O.P. is pushing in defeat are those they condemn when practiced by Democrats: celebrity and identity politics. Palin’s manic post-election publicity tour, which may yet propel her and “the first dude” to “Dancing With the Stars,” is almost a parody of the McCain ad likening Obama to Paris and Britney. Anyone who says so is promptly called out for sexism by the P.C. police of the newly “feminist” G.O.P.

At the risk of being so reviled, let me point out that in the marathon of Palin interviews last week, the single most revealing exchange had nothing to do with her wardrobe or the “jerks” (as she called them) around McCain. It came instead when Wolf Blitzer of CNN asked for some substance by inviting her to suggest “one or two ideas” that Republicans might have to offer. “Well, a lot of Republican governors have really good ideas for our nation,” she responded, without specifying anything except that “it’s all about free enterprise and respecting equality.” Well, yes, but surely there’s some actual new initiative worth mentioning, Blitzer followed up. “Gah!” replied the G.O.P.’s future. “Nothing specific right now!”

The good news for Democrats is a post-election Gallup poll finding that while only 45 percent of Americans want to see Palin have a national political future (and 52 percent of Americans do not), 76 percent of Republicans say bring her on. The bad news for Democrats is that these are the exact circumstances that can make Obama cocky and Democrats sloppy. The worse news for the country is that at a time of genuine national peril we actually do need an opposition party that is not brain-dead.

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Bidding farewell to "Mama Africa"

Large crowds have flocked to a memorial service in Johannesburg for South African singer Miriam Makeba, who died last weekend after a concert in Italy.

Musicians, poets and politicians paid tribute to the 76-year-old performer.

Arts minister Pallo Jordan described Makeba as "a woman whose name became synonymous with the worldwide struggle for freedom in South Africa".

Her family also attended the service at the Coca Cola Dome concert venue, which followed two days of national mourning.

They are expected to hold a smaller service for her cremation on Sunday.

The singer, who was known as Mama Africa, spent more than 30 years in exile after lending her support to the campaign against apartheid.

Her music reverberated with consciousness about the real conditions of South Africans President Kgalema Motlanthe

Her memorial service drew hundreds of mourners, both black and white and of all ages.

South African trumpet player Hugh Masekela, once married to Makeba, performed a solo version of her song Welele to the accompaniment of soft clapping from the crowd.

Poet Maishe Maponya spoke of how her "lips touched our hearts with hymns of beauty" and how she had inspired her people with hope for the future.

Former South African President Thabo Mbeki and current Deputy President Baleka Mbete were also present.

President Kgalema Motlanthe, in Washington for a G20 economic summit, paid tribute to Makeba in a video message.

"Let us say it loud and clear. Miriam Makeba was not affectionately called Mama Africa for nothing," he said. "Her music reverberated with consciousness about the real conditions of South Africans."

Makeba was the first black singer to win a Grammy award, which she shared with Harry Belafonte in 1965.

She was one of Africa's best known singers, famed for hits such as Pata Pata and The Click Song.

Former president Nelson Mandela said she was the "mother of our struggle" and "South Africa's first lady of song".

Her body was flown home to South Africa on Wednesday; the country began a period of national mourning a day later.

Go to original BBC article

Reactions around the world

These are really wonderful pictures...

Barack's step-grandmother Sarah Obama in Kogelo, Kenya

At Obama's former school in Jakarta, Indonesia

Manila, Philippines

Shanghai

Athens, Greece

Jakarta, Indonesia

Jerusalem, Israel

Sydney, Australia

Afghanistan

Obama, Japan

India

Paris, France

Dakar, Senegal

London

The look in this boy's face says it all!

Finishing our work

Obama will always be our first black president. But can he be one of our few great presidents? He is going to have his chance because our greatest presidents are those who assumed the office at some of our darkest hours and at the bottom of some of our deepest holes.

Op-Ed Columnist
Finishing Our Work
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

And so it came to pass that on Nov. 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern time, the American Civil War ended, as a black man — Barack Hussein Obama — won enough electoral votes to become president of the United States.

A civil war that, in many ways, began at Bull Run, Virginia, on July 21, 1861, ended 147 years later via a ballot box in the very same state. For nothing more symbolically illustrated the final chapter of America’s Civil War than the fact that the Commonwealth of Virginia — the state that once exalted slavery and whose secession from the Union in 1861 gave the Confederacy both strategic weight and its commanding general — voted Democratic, thus assuring that Barack Obama would become the 44th president of the United States.

This moment was necessary, for despite a century of civil rights legislation, judicial interventions and social activism — despite Brown v. Board of Education, Martin Luther King’s I-have-a-dream crusade and the 1964 Civil Rights Act — the Civil War could never truly be said to have ended until America’s white majority actually elected an African-American as president.

That is what happened Tuesday night and that is why we awake this morning to a different country. The struggle for equal rights is far from over, but we start afresh now from a whole new baseline. Let every child and every citizen and every new immigrant know that from this day forward everything really is possible in America.

How did Obama pull it off? To be sure, it probably took a once-in-a-century economic crisis to get enough white people to vote for a black man. And to be sure, Obama’s better organization, calm manner, mellifluous speaking style and unthreatening message of “change” all served him well.

But there also may have been something of a “Buffett effect” that countered the supposed “Bradley effect” — white voters telling pollsters they’d vote for Obama but then voting for the white guy. The Buffett effect was just the opposite. It was white conservatives telling the guys in the men’s grill at the country club that they were voting for John McCain, but then quietly going into the booth and voting for Obama, even though they knew it would mean higher taxes.

Why? Some did it because they sensed how inspired and hopeful their kids were about an Obama presidency, and they not only didn’t want to dash those hopes, they secretly wanted to share them. Others intuitively embraced Warren Buffett’s view that if you are rich and successful today, it is first and foremost because you were lucky enough to be born in America at this time — and never forget that. So, we need to get back to fixing our country — we need a president who can unify us for nation-building at home.

And somewhere they also knew that after the abysmal performance of the Bush team, there had to be consequences for the Republican Party. Electing McCain now would have, in some way, meant rewarding incompetence. It would have made a mockery of accountability in government and unleashed a wave of cynicism in America that would have been deeply corrosive.

Obama will always be our first black president. But can he be one of our few great presidents? He is going to have his chance because our greatest presidents are those who assumed the office at some of our darkest hours and at the bottom of some of our deepest holes.

“Taking office at a time of crisis doesn’t guarantee greatness, but it can be an occasion for it,” argued the Harvard University political philosopher Michael Sandel. “That was certainly the case with Lincoln, F.D.R. and Truman.” Part of F.D.R.’s greatness, though, “was that he gradually wove a new governing political philosophy — the New Deal — out of the rubble and political disarray of the economic depression he inherited.” Obama will need to do the same, but these things take time.

“F.D.R. did not run on the New Deal in 1932,” said Sandel. “He ran on balancing the budget. Like Obama, he did not take office with a clearly articulated governing philosophy. He arrived with a confident, activist spirit and experimented. Not until 1936 did we have a presidential campaign about the New Deal. What Obama’s equivalent will be, even he doesn’t know. It will emerge as he grapples with the economy, energy and America’s role in the world. These challenges are so great that he will only succeed if he is able to articulate a new politics of the common good.”

Bush & Co. did not believe that government could be an instrument of the common good. They neutered their cabinet secretaries and appointed hacks to big jobs. For them, pursuit of the common good was all about pursuit of individual self-interest. Voters rebelled against that. But there was also a rebellion against a traditional Democratic version of the common good — that it is simply the sum of all interest groups clamoring for their share.

“In this election, the American public rejected these narrow notions of the common good,” argued Sandel. “Most people now accept that unfettered markets don’t serve the public good. Markets generate abundance, but they can also breed excessive insecurity and risk. Even before the financial meltdown, we’ve seen a massive shift of risk from corporations to the individual. Obama will have to reinvent government as an instrument of the common good — to regulate markets, to protect citizens against the risks of unemployment and ill health, to invest in energy independence.”

But a new politics of the common good can’t be only about government and markets. “It must also be about a new patriotism — about what it means to be a citizen,” said Sandel. “This is the deepest chord Obama’s campaign evoked. The biggest applause line in his stump speech was the one that said every American will have a chance to go to college provided he or she performs a period of national service — in the military, in the Peace Corps or in the community. Obama’s campaign tapped a dormant civic idealism, a hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves, a yearning to be citizens again.”

None of this will be easy. But my gut tells me that of all the changes that will be ushered in by an Obama presidency, breaking with our racial past may turn out to be the least of them. There is just so much work to be done. The Civil War is over. Let reconstruction begin.

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And then they wept

By Charles M. Blow

History will record this as the night the souls of black folk, living and dead, wept – and laughed, screamed and danced – releasing 400 years of pent up emotion.

They were the souls of those whose bodies littered the bottom of the Atlantic, whose families were torn asunder, whose names were erased.

They were those who knew the terror of being set upon by men with clubs, of being trapped in a torched house, of dangling at the end of a rough rope.

They were the souls of those who knew the humiliation of another person’s spit trailing down their faces, of being treated like children well into their twilight years, of being derided and despised for the beauty God gave them.

They were also the tears of those for whom “Yes We Can, ” Obama’s campaign slogan, took on a broader, more profound meaning.

“Yes We Can” escape the prison of lowered expectations and the cycles of poor choices. “Yes We Can” rise above history and beyond hatred. “Yes We Can” ascend to Martin Luther King’s mountain top and see the promised land where dreams are fulfilled, where the best man wins and where justice prevails.

During this election African-Americans, their hearts weary from disappointment, dared to hope and dream again. Tonight their dream has been realized.

Whether or not you agree with Barack Obama’s politics, there is no denying that his election represents a seminal moment in the African-American narrative and a giant leap forward on the road to America’s racial reconciliation.

In fact everyone, regardless of race, should feel free to shed a tear and be proud of how far our country has come.

Feel free to share your thoughts.