President Barack Obama: The first black family in the White House

David Muir reflects on Obama's election in an article for Keep the Faith magazine.

10 November 2008

The election of Barack Obama as president elect of the United States of America is a defining moment in the most powerful nation in the world. Many expected him to win but when he reached the magic number of 270 votes from the Electoral College he crossed the Rubicon and ushered in a new day in American history and international politics.

Decades of thwarted dreams and deferred gratification were fulfilled in a moment. It was my 14 year old daughter Shani who came into my room, torch in hand, in the early hours of Wednesday morning to break the news to me: “Dad, Dad, Barack Obama has won!” The fact that she stayed up all night watching the results coming in as she communicated with her friends through text messages, MSN, and Facebook is a message in itself about the way this election has captured the imagination of young people. But it is also a message about the strategic use of modern technology in political communication and campaigning.

No one can doubt the use to which this was put in mobilising support for Obama, getting the vote out and finally electing him. A master stroke by Obama and his chief strategist, David Axelrod, in reaching millions of younger voters. In the coming months and years, I suspect there will be lots of Ph. D theses on the use of the internet and Facebook in the U.S. presidential elections of 2008.

The first African American President, the first black family in the White House! After we have used all those adjectives like “historic”, “sweeping”, “seismic” and “stupendous”, the question for me is this: What does this all mean for America and the wider world? What are we to learn and extract from this Barack Obama phenomenon?

It would be difficult to address these questions adequately here, but the symbolism of a black man in the White House can not be lost on anyone unless, like the character Rip Van Winkle in Washington Irving’s famous story, they have been asleep for decades! History is nothing if it is not didactic—it teaches. But it also has a corrective and psychic function. And symbols need to have substance; they also have to speak to social reality and to sociology.

In voting for Barack Obama as president elect to the White House some will say that America has truly come of age. In his Out of Our Past the American historian Carl N. Degler spoke of the deep contradiction in American history between its founding ideals of freedom, equality and certain “unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, on the one hand, and the presence of slavery and the treatment of the African in America, on the other hand. Martin Luther King eloquently exposed this contradiction in his 1963 “I have a Dream Speech”. He challenged his fellow countrymen and women to rise up and keep faith with these ideals in honouring what he called the nation’s “sacred obligation” to extend the full “riches of freedom and the security of justice” to its black citizens.

The election of Barack Obama resolves (symbolically at least) this historic and existential contradiction. White boys always knew that they could grow up to be President of the United States of America. But black boys can articulate a similar dream without fear of contradiction or nullification now that Barack Obama has given substance to that dream. And what is true for black boys in America is also true for black girls, white girls, Latinos and others in that great country.

This was Dr King’s dream; this was what he worked for; this was what he and thousands of black and white Americans struggled for; and this was what that “Drum Major for righteousness” finally died for. He reminded the crowd gathered before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and a watching world, that “if America is to be a great nation, this dream must become true”. Well, in the election of Obama, America and a watching world witnessed something of the political realisation of that dream. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., would be no less jubilant than his friend and civil rights warrior, Rev Jesse Jackson, had he lived to witness Obama’s victory. Jesse Jackson’s tears on the night of Obama’s victory are a language we understand.

Some say it could only happen in America, a sign of its changing and progressive political culture. A jubilant Obama reminded his supporters in Chicago that ‘if there is anyone who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.’

The moment of glory and triumph belongs to Obama, but I also want to pay tribute to Senator McCain and his gracious words in defeat. The allusion to Booker T. Washington’s invitation to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 in the speech will not have escaped historians. As the pre-eminent African American spokesman for the uplift of his people (and beloved of many in the establishment for his conservative views, exhorting his race not to “permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities”, as well as to learn to “dignify and glorify common labour” in the post-Emancipation era) Washington was invited to dine at the White House. This was an outrage to many Southerners — especially to the Governor of Mississippi, James Kimble Vardaman, who later became a Senator. In a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt on 20th October 1908 Washington complained about “the Vardaman sentiment against the education of the Negro”.

According to Washington, Vardaman was even abusing the white people who attended Washington’s meetings to hear him speak about “Negro education” and raise funds for his Tuskegee Institute. Vardaman’s (the “Great White Chief” as he was called and a supporter of lynching) racism and hatred for black people led him to remark after Washington dined with the President that his odour so saturated the White House that it caused the rats to take refuge in the stables. Of course, Senator McCain was right to remind Americans, and the world, how far they had come from “the cruel and frightful bigotry of that time”, and of the historic significance of the election of Barack Obama for African Americans. This speaks well of the stature of the man who wished “Godspeed to the man who was my former opponent and will be my president”.

On November 4, 2008, millions of American voters spoke clearly in electing Barack Obama to the highest office in the land. Although we did not have a vote we will feel the effects for years to come. In the symbolism of black political iconography Obama’s achievement is out there in the stratosphere. Symbols are powerful, but they need substance; they need to speak to sociology and the social reality of everyday life. For the moment, some will want to reflect on this powerful symbolism; others may want to bask in its glow at least until Barack Obama’s inauguration on 20th January 2009.

In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs (September/October 2008) the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, stated that the next president of the U.S.A. will not only be taking on “the most extraordinary job ever devised”, but he will also “inherit a more difficult opening day set of international problems than any of his predecessors have since at least the end of World War II”. What a heavy burden has descended upon the shoulders of Barack Obama. This is where the substance of the new president and his administration will be tested.

And what about the sociology and the sociaI reality of black America? I suspect the cultural and intellectual debate that the popular radio and television commentator Tavis Smiley started (see his How to Make Black America Better: Leading African Americans Speak Out, Anchor Books: 2001) will continue, but with a new poignancy and urgency. So will the debate sparked by Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint’s controversial book Come on People where they bemoan the poor education attainment, family breakdown and the disproportionate rates of African American incarceration. Will there be a turn around in the incidence of underachievement and a renaissance in the culture and institutions of black life as a result of Barack Obama’s election to the White House? Put another way: will the symbolism provide sufficient encouragement for black people to get a psychological lift to try again, to persevere, to aim high? Optimistically, I want to say “Yes!” To say otherwise is to succumb to despair and the negation of personal agency. Doubtless, many of those same questions will be asked of us in the UK. Someone asked me whether the election of Barack Obama will help to reduce knife and gun crime in the capital. Wish to God it would.

What a time to be alive; what a generation to be living in. I guess my beloved sixteen months old granddaughter Reya will soon be learning to pronounce the name of Barack Obama as she comes to join in what is becoming the new world wide chant of “Yes we can”.

Dr R David Muir, Evangelical Alliance Director of Public Policy
This article appeared in the Christmas and New Year's 08/09 edition of Keep the Faith Magazine.