Timothy Garton Ash: I saw Americans dance with history, chanting 'Yes we can!' But can they?
[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.]
To join that ebullient crowd in front of the White House shortly after midnight on Tuesday November 4 2008 was to dance with history. "Bush out now!" and "Goodbye, na na na na", they chanted, to the sound of drums. "Obama! Obama!" Car horns honked. A saxophone blared from the passenger window of a bright red pick-up truck. A young man beat a saucepan with a metal spoon. "This is the biggest housewarming party I've ever been to," an African-American woman with a stars-and-stripes headscarf dreamily confided, as she shimmied across 16th Street. And, this being our time, everyone both yapped and photo-snapped on their mobile phones.
Most of all, though, these mainly young revellers chanted the slogan that Obama had just made the leitmotif of his acceptance speech in Chicago: "Yes We Can! Yes We Can!" Even the car horns took up the three-stroke rhythm: beep-beep-beep. When I went to bed, well after two in the morning, I could still hear the chants reverberating up to my hotel window. Yes-We-Can! Yes-We-Can!
But can they? Can he? Can we?
To say that he is the first black president in American history is more to write the last lines of the last chapter than the start of a new one. That chapter of pain is both remarkably ancient and shockingly recent. I observed people voting in a downtown polling station located in a church of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, which, a sign records, was established to protest against segregated worship in 1787. Across the Anacostia river, in a poor neighbourhood where mine was almost the only white face, an election supervisor - a Baptist preacher in everyday life - told me how African-Americans, often voting for the first time, had brought their children to witness the moment of which Dr King had dreamed. Only by listening to their voices can you fully appreciate what will be the impact of the mere sight of a black family occupying that white house.
But Obama 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.
For Obama is simultaneously the first post-ethnic president. To reduce this story to the black-white dichotomy is as useful as a black and white photograph of a colourful scene. John McCain may have singled out Joe the plumber to represent an old-fashioned, putative "silent majority" of white working-class Americans, but actually they now constitute a (not so) silent minority. And José the plumber voted for Obama. In fact, Obama's vote benefited from almost every aspect of America's growing demographic diversity. Introducing him in Florida during the campaign, Bill Clinton highlighted this new diversity, saying that both Florida and Obama represent "the world's present and America's future". That seems to me the wrong way round: it's America's present and the world's future. Where once America lagged, it now leads...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
To join that ebullient crowd in front of the White House shortly after midnight on Tuesday November 4 2008 was to dance with history. "Bush out now!" and "Goodbye, na na na na", they chanted, to the sound of drums. "Obama! Obama!" Car horns honked. A saxophone blared from the passenger window of a bright red pick-up truck. A young man beat a saucepan with a metal spoon. "This is the biggest housewarming party I've ever been to," an African-American woman with a stars-and-stripes headscarf dreamily confided, as she shimmied across 16th Street. And, this being our time, everyone both yapped and photo-snapped on their mobile phones.
Most of all, though, these mainly young revellers chanted the slogan that Obama had just made the leitmotif of his acceptance speech in Chicago: "Yes We Can! Yes We Can!" Even the car horns took up the three-stroke rhythm: beep-beep-beep. When I went to bed, well after two in the morning, I could still hear the chants reverberating up to my hotel window. Yes-We-Can! Yes-We-Can!
But can they? Can he? Can we?
To say that he is the first black president in American history is more to write the last lines of the last chapter than the start of a new one. That chapter of pain is both remarkably ancient and shockingly recent. I observed people voting in a downtown polling station located in a church of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, which, a sign records, was established to protest against segregated worship in 1787. Across the Anacostia river, in a poor neighbourhood where mine was almost the only white face, an election supervisor - a Baptist preacher in everyday life - told me how African-Americans, often voting for the first time, had brought their children to witness the moment of which Dr King had dreamed. Only by listening to their voices can you fully appreciate what will be the impact of the mere sight of a black family occupying that white house.
But Obama 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.
For Obama is simultaneously the first post-ethnic president. To reduce this story to the black-white dichotomy is as useful as a black and white photograph of a colourful scene. John McCain may have singled out Joe the plumber to represent an old-fashioned, putative "silent majority" of white working-class Americans, but actually they now constitute a (not so) silent minority. And José the plumber voted for Obama. In fact, Obama's vote benefited from almost every aspect of America's growing demographic diversity. Introducing him in Florida during the campaign, Bill Clinton highlighted this new diversity, saying that both Florida and Obama represent "the world's present and America's future". That seems to me the wrong way round: it's America's present and the world's future. Where once America lagged, it now leads...