obama and the real america

I know, this blog has been all doom and gloom lately, all Gaza and torture. And I have been hatin' on Obama a bit. (Still mad about the Rick Warren thing, btw.) But today is Inauguration Day, and even those of us who have low expectations for the amount of change to come are sure as hell happy to see Bush go.

It's only been eight years, but I think you'll agree that it feels like a lot longer. The year 2000 seems incredibly far away now. Back then, I was a freshman at Columbia University, one of our new president's alma maters. Ralph Nader's 2000 election campaign (along with the Second Intifada in Palestine, which started three weeks into my first semester) was in many ways my introduction to politics. I've never been an activist without Bush in office. It's a bit weird.

Thinking back to that time, a few memories jump out. Certainly, the Nader "super rally" that filled Madison Square Garden is one of them. We were all the way in the nosebleed seats since we'd been tabling outside until the last possible minute, and to this day I can't remember what Nader actually said. But I remember that Ani DiFranco played "Fuel" and Eddie Vedder sang "The Times, They Are A-Changin'," and it felt like maybe they really were.

I remember, quite distinctly, holding a sign at a small, silent vigil for Palestine on the Sundial (where all protests take place at Columbia) while a Zionist student spat at us while he passed. He didn't quite have the balls to spit *on* us, but we got the message. I was seething with rage because I wanted to yell at him, but I couldn't since it was a silent vigil. I decided silent vigils were stupid.

I also remember the first week of the spring semester, in which we filled five buses in five days to go protest Bush's inauguration.

It's strange to see so many people pouring into DC again, but filled with hope instead of anger. Two million people, many estimate, plus untold numbers watching around the country. I was in Washington for the March for Women's Lives, when the crowd was somewhere around a million, and this crowd definitely looks bigger to me.

To me, President Obama is far more interesting for who he is than for his actual politics. All cynicism aside, anyone must admit that Obama has connected to something in the American collective psyche, and it can't all be due to image control and clever use of Facebook. For the first time...maybe ever, millions of Americans have a president with whom they feel they can identify.

For many years (well, at least the past two elections) politicians from both parties have insisted that they are appealing to "real Americans" in the "real America" that's out there somewhere.

Democrats and Republicans alike seem to agree on what this "real America" consists of: white residents of small towns in "the heartland," a vague area that seems to be defined only as being not the Northeast, California or Chicago. These "real Americans" are simple people with simple values--they like beer, they go to church (Protestant Christian of some sort) on Sunday, and they are not particularly well-educated or even well-traveled.

But wait! The actual real America--the one that can vote--just elected a dude named BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA. A bi-racial child of a white mother (born in Kansas only through the viccissitudes of the US Army) and Kenyan father. A self-identified Black man who spent his formative years being raised by a white family in Hawai'i--one of only four states in the US where whites do not comprise a majority of the population*, and the US state with the highest percentage of both indigenous people and people of mixed race. A son of a twice-divorced career woman who also had a child with an Indonesian man, a daughter who married a Canadian of Malaysian Chinese descent. Obama himself married a woman with a much more clasically African-American heritage: a descendant of slaves whose family migrated from South Carolina to Chicago.

This was a guy who lived in Jakarta after the brutal coup by the US-backed dictator Suharto, whose followers killed half a million people to take power; who lived in the New York City of Rent, when it was still possible to see a Broadway show for $3 (!); who lived in multi-ethnic Honolulu, Los Angeles and Chicago--all by the time he turned 25. (The New York Times ran a splendid editorial the other day in which six writers talked with surprising passion and detail about each of those places during those times.)

I grew up in Baltimore, a majority Black city (although you certainly wouldn't know it from my neighborhood or my high school.) I've lived in New York and Los Angeles since then. Growing up with only one kind of person around is as alien a thought to me as growing up in Jakarta or Honolulu is to some other people.

I recently watch an all-around fantastic movie called The Visitor. Look it up if you haven't seen it. The movie is based on a chance encounter between a middle-aged Connecticut college professor and the immigrant couple who have been illegally living in his vacant Manhattan apartment. (They are wise enough to know that leaving a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village vacant is a crime for which squatting is an entirely appropriate punishment.)

The professor, of course, studies globalization. "That's us!" the young man, Tarek, exclaims excitedly. "Syria and Senegal," he says, gesturing to himself and his girlfriend. When Tarek's mother shows up later in the film, she introduces herself to an Egyptian coffee shop owner as "Palestinian, from Damascus." In the US, she lives in Michigan--which, coincidentally, has the nation's second-largest Arab population after California.

What is the point of all this? It's not that the politicians' homogenous, white, Christian, small-town America isn't real--although it's certainly not the way the majority of Americans have lived for nearly 100 years, and is perhaps based on the disproportionate weight given to the American South in US politics. It's not that there's anything inherently wrong with beer-drinking white Christians from small towns--although I would argue that isolation and homogenaeity have a conservatizing effect. It's just that the "other" America--urban, mobile, multi-ethnic; an America of multiple, overlapping and not always obvious identities, is at least as real as the "real America" the politicians talk about.

These are the people who, I would wager--whether they are African-American or not--saw a bit of themselves reflected in Barack Obama. And it seems to me that these other Americans, whose power has long been ignored, are the millions who came out into the street on election night and inauguration day.

*For the record, the other states with a minority white population are California, New Mexico, and (surprise!) Texas.