In the US President-elect’s first press conference, Barack Obama joked about the breed of dog which would join his two daughters in the White House. “Our preference is to get a shelter dog, but obviously, a lot of the shelter dogs are mutts like me”. Obama’s reference to mixed race is not to be taken lightly, it represents who he is – the son of mixed parents, a black immigrant father from Kenya and a white mother born in the United States.
The new President-elect’s biography is a complete melting pot in so many ways: religion (Islam and Protestantism), ethnicity (black and white) and geography (Africa and America). Herein lies Obama’s success: moving beyond multiculturalism. Escaping from the trap of monoculture, monoreligion and monoethnicity is not enough, you need to find a meeting point and a point of comparison between all these differences. Barack Obama has experienced this for himself: “Obama”, comments Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian, “is much more than just black American. Like a growing number of citizens of our mixed-up world he is, as the columnist Michael Kinsley nicely puts it, “a one-man ethnic stew”. This qualifies him to represent all those Americans, of every hue and mix, that I saw in the long queues of people waiting to vote in downtown Washington, and in that crowd before the White House. “Where are you from?” I asked a man who I guessed might be of North African origin. He stopped dancing for a moment, looked at me and said: “From my mother.” A wonderful answer, also a rebuke, and minted for the age of Obama”.
The issue of background is drastically put into perspective in an open society like America, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, but where you’re going. Identity is released from the defensive question: Who are we? The new question is more constructive: What can we do together? And setting the agenda will be the future rather than the past, a shared interest rather than living in fear of one other. The next resident of the White House was able to interpret the American dream with an extremely effective slogan: Yes, We Can. The change which American voters want, however, has not come out of nowhere; it has grown from a development of several highly significant ideas such as the issue of diversity. For a long time American society has viewed difference, especially regarding black people, as a threat to stability. It took Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement to put racial laws into serious ethical and political crisis. Today, Barack Obama’s victory ratifies a new era in which differences are called upon to coexist peacefully, to express the best of the best instead of the worst of the worst!
It seems that the myth regarding purity of race has suffered a heavy blow with the arrival of the Obama family to the White House. And so begin the Obama years, a time where multiculturalism can become inter-multiculturalism.
Amara Lakhous is an Italian-Algerian writer and anthropologist. He is the author of “Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio” (Europa Editions 2008) and has lived in Rome since 1995.
Translation by Helen Waghorn