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sophiaserpentiaReza Aslan has made a few waves with a piece in the Washington Post addressing the self-congratulatory idea being tossed around by the talking heads, of Barack Obama's "soft power:"
I think Aslan is overstating the case a bit -- in some places of the world at least, they do indeed care about whether or not the son of a Kenyan man becomes president of the United States. And even if people in various parts of the world get excited about the religious and racial implications of an Obama victory, the honeymoon will be quickly over if US troops do not soon leave their country, or if we maintain trade policies that impoverish children worldwide.
But Aslan does bring us to an important point, which is, namely, that the pundit-ocrats are already patting themselves on the back for living in such an enlightened country that we could actually elect a black man president.
Not to say it won't be a big thing, but we do not get medals just for voting for a black man. We don't get brownie points. We don't get to toot our own horn far and wide and proclaim that we are enlightened and crap. Fighting racism is not a series of feel-good proclamations, like parades on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It's about righting the tangible harms and inequalities that have been done to people, and which hurt them physically and mentally every day of their lives. We cannot simply elect a black man president and then proclaim that racism is a thing of the past when there are still, when there are still, tens of thousands of New Orleans residents displaced from their homes.
The argument usually goes something like this: Imagine that a young Muslim boy in, say, Egypt, is watching television when suddenly he sees this black man -- the grandson of a Kenyan Muslim, no less! -- who spent a small part of his childhood in Indonesia, taking the oath of office as president of the United States. Suddenly, the boy realizes that the United States is not the demonic, anti-Islamic place he's always been told it was. Meanwhile, all around the Muslim world, other young would-be jihadists have a similar epiphany. "Maybe Osama bin Laden is wrong," they think. "Maybe America is not so bad after all."
Mind you, it is not anything this new president says or does that changes their minds. As the conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan describes this imaginary scene in his recent paean to Obama in the Atlantic Monthly, it is Obama's face -- just his face -- that "proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."
As someone who once was that young Muslim boy everyone seems to be imagining (albeit in Iran rather than Egypt), I'll let you in on a secret: He could not care less who the president of the United States is. He is totally unconcerned with whatever barriers a black (or female, for that matter) president would be breaking. He couldn't name three U.S. presidents if he tried. He cares only about one thing: what the United States will do.
I think Aslan is overstating the case a bit -- in some places of the world at least, they do indeed care about whether or not the son of a Kenyan man becomes president of the United States. And even if people in various parts of the world get excited about the religious and racial implications of an Obama victory, the honeymoon will be quickly over if US troops do not soon leave their country, or if we maintain trade policies that impoverish children worldwide.
But Aslan does bring us to an important point, which is, namely, that the pundit-ocrats are already patting themselves on the back for living in such an enlightened country that we could actually elect a black man president.
Not to say it won't be a big thing, but we do not get medals just for voting for a black man. We don't get brownie points. We don't get to toot our own horn far and wide and proclaim that we are enlightened and crap. Fighting racism is not a series of feel-good proclamations, like parades on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It's about righting the tangible harms and inequalities that have been done to people, and which hurt them physically and mentally every day of their lives. We cannot simply elect a black man president and then proclaim that racism is a thing of the past when there are still, when there are still, tens of thousands of New Orleans residents displaced from their homes.
