This is an editorial from The Nation magazine by a black Briton who is a columnist for an English paper The Guardian -Gary Younge - I think it gives an interesting perspective on the "Obamarama" phenomenon of the past few months and of the expectations Obama is facing.
I think it makes salient points about that darn race thing and American elections.
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Obama is, of course, a worthy subject. He is the smartest, savviest, handsomest and most charismatic man in the Senate--sadly, the competition is not great. In an era when America's political class lacks character and intelligence, he stands out. What little the nation has seen of him, it has liked. But none of this quite explains the magnitude of the Obamathon currently taking place.
Perhaps what the nation has liked most is not what Obama has said or done but what he is. In short, Obama is a black man who does not scare white people. This is mostly not Obama's fault. He is who he is. He has a life to live, a job to do and a book to promote. He cannot be held responsible for a white paranoia that--outside the music, sports and entertainment industries--demands: If you have to be black, then please don't be too black.
It is impossible to understand his currency or his trajectory without taking this into account. Describing the crowd's reaction to him in Rockford, Illinois, Time's Joe Klein noted: "The African Americans tend to be fairly reserved.... The white people, by contrast, are out of control." White commentators get out of control too. David Brooks wrote, "With his multiethnic family and his globe-spanning childhood, there is a little piece of everything in Obama." Klein has ranked Obama alongside Colin Powell, Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan as "black people who...seem to have an iconic power over the American imagination because they transcend racial stereotypes."
Quite how a person "transcends" anything to do with race in the United States in 2006 is difficult to fathom. In a country where whites were five times more likely than blacks to believe that racism played no part in the Katrina debacle, you are far more likely to "transcend" gravity.
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read the whole article here...
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061113/younge
