MORE THAN BLACK

The Telegraph
Calcutta, India
Saturday , September 26 , 2009

“You lie!” These are the words with which Republican Joe Wilson interrupted his president’s speech in Congress earlier this month. Mr Wilson’s grammar is ambiguous. His words hang between a specific allegation and a general truth: the president is lying, or the president lies. To jump from that to the next stage is easy. If one knows that the president lies, then is Mr Wilson’s you referring to only the president, or to the president and his kind? If the latter, then who belongs to Barack Obama’s kind? Already, that thing of darkness is calling out to be acknowledged. And this is precisely what Jimmy Carter, ex-president and octogenarian Democrat, did on TV soon after. From his long knowledge of the American south, he had no doubt at all that much of the animosity towards Mr Obama was based on the fact that he was a black man. But, even more significantly, the president himself publicly disagreed with Mr Carter’s view, saying that race was not the “overriding issue” here. And with this cool dismissal, the first black president of the United States of America went back to being what he is much more comfortable being: a president who happens to be black.
This is a tightrope that Mr Obama, the person as well as the president, will never be spared from having to walk. When he called the police stupid for arresting a black man trying to break into his own home after locking himself out, he had to control the dam age by inviting this man and the policeman who arrested him to his own home for a drink. There, he oversaw a peace-making chat between the black professor and the white policeman, during which his own stakes in the situation — as a man whose colour was more complicated than either black or white — were played down with a calculated mix of the smart and the casual. Earlier, while campaigning for presidency, he had to dissociate himself from the radicalism of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, without disavowing his love and respect for the reverend. He did so, in his “race speech” of March 2008 in Philadelphia, by writing his personal story into it and yet avoiding a “racial stalemate” by making sure that “our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black”.

Full Editorial: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090926/jsp/opinion/story_11541192.jsp