The World's President: Part 2 - Change

On the stump, Obama liked to talk about his unique heritage, his "father from Kenya and mother from Kansas." Poised between two cultural worlds and witness to many more in his formative years, Obama's childhood presented many complex challenges to the traditional, rooted sense of identity. His father abandoned him when he was very young; he was raised for years by his white grandmother in Hawaii; he spent some time in Indonesia when his mother was married to an officer there. With this diverse background, largely separated from both African-American culture and his African father, Obama was able to play with many identities in a Protean manner. It wasn't until after his extensive education at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard that he moved to the South Side of Chicago, began community organizing, integrating himself into one of the biggest black neighborhoods in the country, and attending the Afro-centric church of the now infamous Jeremiah Wright. At this point in his life Obama embraced "blackness" with vigor. I imagine that a certain realization came to him at some point: in this world, if you look black, you are black. No matter if your mother is a white Kansan and you grew up in Hawaii: you may have had a white upbringing, but if you look black, it's simple - you're black. The choice that Obama made to embrace this half of himself and the African-American experience, therefore, was both elective and necessary. He could never be, after all, a white guy (with a black father).

It's been amazing how little the issue of race has actually come up in this campaign. Despite some veiled racial smears centered on Obama's "Otherness," he never really emphasized his "blackness," nor was this point a major issue in the back and forth tug of war of a modern political campaign. Instead, he talked about roots that defy simple black/white dichotomy - in other words, he discussed growing up multiracial. Intriguingly, however, in the wake of his victory, Obama's race has all of sudden become much more present on the national stage. "First African-American President," "America broke the race barrier," "Black President," etc. were many of the front page titles that greeted us Wednesday morning. It is fascinating that, while Obama himself emphasized his biracial background and spoke of a "post-race" world, the world on the day after his election hailed it as "a historic moment when the first black man is elected president."

This is odd. Something about the race issue here is eerily reminiscent of the Jim Crow laws that classified anyone with as much as 1/16 black blood as officially black. Obama is 1/2, of course, and it is clear from his appearance that he has this in his background. Yet calling Obama simply "the first black president" is - while filled with justified historical and symbolic importance - not entirely accurate. He is biracial. And his political persona, the one the world has become captivated with, is more closely tied to this complex identity than one that is either simply black or white.

Obama is a fascinating new type of public figure because so many disparate groups of people in the world identify with him. To Africans (and Kenyans in particular) he is a native son; to Indonesians, he is an initiate into their culture and ways; to Hawaiians he is one of them; to black Americans, he is black man in America. His mixed background and mobile upbringing in many ways allowed him to become a cultural chameleon. As Judith Warner points out, it is very easy to identify with all sorts of aspects of his life:

The glory of Barack Obama is that there are so many different kinds of us who can claim a piece of that “our.” African-Americans, Democrats, post-boomers, progressives, people who rose from essentially nowhere and through hard work and determination succeeded beyond their parents’ wildest dreams are the most obvious.

The fact that everyone can claim a piece of Barack Obama is telling about what sort of a country (and world) we live in now. Sure, there are those who identify more with the hockey-mom Sarah Palin or the everyday workingman Joe the Plumber, but provincial, white, narrow-minded types like this are not the future of this country. The GOP is realizing this fact now, in the depths of their defeat. Appealing only to white, rural, uneducated, older voters is a strategy that will only lead to greater irrelevance. Our society is transforming, but the Republican Party doesn't realize that yet. This election was a stunning refutation of this ignorance: we've changed, but the Grand Old Party hasn't.

Americans are increasingly brown and increasingly mobile. Like Obama, many of us these days live bi-cultural (or tri-, quadri-) lives, speaking one language to our grandparents and another to our peers. White families in Portland eat sushi made by Mexican chefs; Asian kids in LA break dance; Arab-Americans hang the US flag proudly outside their homes on the 4th of July. This is the new face of America. Yet at the GOP convention, you had to strain your eyes to spot a bit of color in the crowd.

Also, more and more of us have the experience now of living in multiple places while growing up. It is not uncommon for young people to have lived in different states, gone to college in a place far away from where they were born, worked in locales far away from where they went to college, etc. Living in different places can give perspective and nuance to your understanding of culture. It is also make you more sensitive and culturally flexible. Yet to the modern GOP, this is seen as a negative. I don't mean to demean Sarah Palin for staying in the same small town her whole life - there are definite virtues to that. But she certainly shouldn't have touted her "small town experience" as being fundamentally more American than a background like Obama's. Many of us live mobile lives now, and we identify much more strongly with Obama's varied past than with a woman whose imagination and curiosity never seem to have ventured outside Wasilla's borders.

Towards the desperate end of the presidential race, the McCain campaign tried to portray Barack Obama as unknown, threatening, and Other. It is telling that America rejected this characterization wholesale. It also makes you wonder: in today's America, who is the "Other"? If we identify more with a multiracial, multicultural, mobile, educated, young man than we do with Joe the Plumber, paragon of Americanness, this to me indicates that we've changed a lot as a country over the last number of years.

"Change" is another buzzword of the old Obama campaign. It's had a lot of harmless fun poked at it over the course of the campaign, and in many ways it's lost its meaning through repetition. Nonetheless, what a perfect description of what this election represents. I think Barack Obama revealed a lot in his speeches when he says, "'change' isn't about me, it's about you." Although there's been a lot of demagoguery around the man, he is not leading the enthusiastic masses to change; he is not the magical agent of change. Rather, he in an embodiment of the change that our culture has been going through already. What he talks about and who he is isn't foreign, new, and exotic - it is how many of us live right now. What he represents mirrors what many of us already know to be true about the country and the world we live in.

-- This essay appears in full in the Miami-based online culture and lifestyle magazine Fábrika here. --