Thanksgiving this year has special poignancy and meaning for me. Clearly, the election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States has electrified the imagination and transformed American society. The ascension of a black American to the highest office in the land and, some would say, in the world, has rewritten history on the winds of change. Charles Johnson, African American philosopher and writer, has noted that Obama’s run for the presidency has posed the need for a new black American narrative.
Johnson, in an article that appeared in the Summer, 2008 issue of The American Scholar,
“The End of the Black Narrative” , says the old narrative of black victimization has run its course. That is not to say that race no longer plays a role in human affairs in the U.S., but that role is much more complex than the African descendants of the slaves brought to Jamestown four centuries ago fighting for their rights from the Euro-American descendants of the British settlers who brought the slaves to Virginia. Without repeating the details of Johnson’s argument, the background Barack Obama brought to the presidential race is emblematic of the very diversity of the U.S. black population. Blacks in this land can trace their heritage back to Africa through the peculiar institution of slavery, but also through immigration from the Caribbean, from West Africa, from East Africa, and even from Europe via the Caribbean. One of the writer’s friends (who has since passed away) is a black Briton whose father is an Afro-Cuban with roots in the British West Indies.
While Obama received some criticism for not mentioning Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by name in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last summer, it is clear he owes part of his narrative and much of his symbolic language to Dr. King and the civil rights movement. However, as some commentators have pointed out, it would be unfair to characterize Obama specifically as a black leader. Obama enjoyed connections to the civil rights movement once removed in the person of campaign co-chair Jesse Jackson Jr. While the younger Jackson played an integral role in supporting Obama’s presidential bid, there were some old-line civil rights leaders, Jackson’s father among them, who not only backed Obama’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, but wondered aloud if the junior senator from Illinois were black enough.
I suggest that a productive approach is to place Obama in a broader context, one consistent with Johnson’s call for a new black narrative. The anti-Apartheid Afrikaner artist and poet, Breyten Breytenbach, in a recent radio interview, drew parallels between Obama and Nelson Mandela. While his reason for making the comparison had to do more with the unifying efforts both leaders are noted for than for any Mandela-like deeds that the younger man has accomplished to date, mentioning them in the same breath supports a universalizing of the black narrative, communicating its broad human appeal. When Mandela emerged from prison in 1990, it was a moment no less earth-shattering than the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nelson Mandela showed that no trace of bitterness remained from his years in prison. He was able to fashion a new nation and overcome intense racial bitterness with a message of reconciliation that no one else could have managed. Like Obama’s words, Mandela’s message easily crossed national borders and resonated globally.
I started this piece referencing giving thanks. I am thankful that my father, who at age 83, was able to vote for the first time for a black American candidate for the office of president. I am grateful that my sons, ages 24 and 22, were similarly able to cast their votes. My father came of age at the height of legal segregation and during the Great Depression and the Second World War. My sons are also coming of age during the greatest economic challenge since the Great Depression while the U.S. is fighting two wars. I am thankful that black women centenarians such as Dilla Burt and Ann Nixon Cooper were able to vote for a historic candidate. I am grateful that my African American wife was able to watch a victorious Barack Obama consciously symbolic cleanse and sanctify the ground at Grant Park on election night. This was the very same park where she and other demonstrators had to flee the rioting Chicago Police during the 1968 Democratic Convention as democracy suffered a near-fatal blow. I know that some American Indians view Thanksgiving as a commemoration of the first American holocaust, but the joyful tears of a new black, brown, red, yellow, and white narrative will help wipe away the pain. For that I am grateful to Barack Obama on this Thanksgiving Day, 2008.
