August 3, 2007

Barack Obama: Trailblazer for Black Americans

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

There are many reasons why it would be nice to see the junior senator from Illinois in the United States Senate, Barack Hussein Obama, become the Democratic Party’s nominee for the U.S. presidency in 2008 and go on to win the general election.

But here’s a particularly good one for those of us here in Canada tired of the constant America-bashing we have to put up with from the liberal and left wing of our political spectrum:

Not only is Obama black, he is the son of an African Muslim from Kenya who came to the United States as a student, and he has a decidedly non-Anglo-Saxon name. (His mother is a white American from Kansas.)

Yet he is being taken more seriously than any previous black candidates, including Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Our Canadian leftists harp incessantly about American racism and xenophobia. But with all of our vaunted multicultural policies, I haven’t noticed anyone like Obama leading any of our political parties.

Born in Honolulu, with its culturally heterogeneous mix of indigenous Hawaiians, other Pacific Islanders, Asians, and whites, for much of his youth Obama lived outside the U.S.

His parents divorced when he was a child and his father, a member of Kenya’s second-largest ethnic group, the Luo, returned to Kenya and remarried. Obama has a number of half-siblings there.

Obama’s mother later married an Indonesian student and the family moved to the world’s largest Muslim country, where Obama attended school in Jakarta for four years. Obama is today a member of the United Church of Christ.

Barack Obama represents the new diversity among black Americans, who now number about 37 million people.

Traditionally, African-American identity was built on an ancestral connection to slavery. American blacks were, by definition, people whose ancestors had arrived in America prior to the abolition of the slave trade in the nineteenth century.

They had lost their African cultures and languages – most native-born blacks don’t know their specific ethnic heritage. They were, in that sense, despite the legacy of slavery, racism and segregation, quintessential Americans.

After all, given racist American immigration laws, their numbers were not augmented by new waves of immigration from Africa. Until the twentieth century, most lived in rural areas of the old slave states of the U.S. South. They were a very homogeneous group.

In 1965, however, the U.S. liberalized its immigration laws, and removed quotas based on national origin. The Immigration and Naturalization Act now allowed more non-Europeans to enter the country and this has led to profound demographic changes in America.

In the past 30 years, one million people have come from Africa to the United States, from countries as different as Ghana and Nigeria, Senegal and Somalia.

Another 1.5 million blacks claim Caribbean ancestry; they have arrived from Haiti, Jamaica, and many other islands in the West Indies.

Nearly 25 percent of the growth in the black population between 1990 and 2000 was due to immigration and this pattern is accelerating. There is now a large African and Afro-Caribbean diaspora population in the United States.

All these new black immigrants have brought their own cultures with them, and they have remained distinct from the native African-American population. Many are Muslims, whereas most of the historic black community in the U.S. has been devoutly Protestant.

Like other recent newcomers, they settle in the large cities, mainly in the north and west. Many have become successful entrepreneurs and their children have attained high educational levels.

A disproportionate percentage of black students at elite universities are African or the children of African immigrants. (Obama’s father obtained a PhD from Harvard University and Obama attended Harvard Law School.)

Some African-Americans complain that Obama is “not black enough” because of his heritage. But many others realize that the old criteria by which they identify themselves don’t fit this new reality, which Barack Obama personifies.