Wed, Nov 12, 2008 page9

• Election makes world rethink its image of ‘racist’ US

  • By Keith Richburg / THE OBSERVER
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  Back in midsummer, when the long, hard-fought Democratic primary campaign was drawing to an exhausting end, I heard a lot of skeptics saying that even though Senator Barack Obama had prevailed for the nomination he could never win the presidency. The US, I heard over and over again, wasn’t ready to elect a black man as president.

  What was unusual about these sentiments was that they weren’t mostly from Americans — although there were plenty of skeptics here, too. Instead, the most pessimistic were my friends around the world.

  Despite some notable advances for black Americans over the years — Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as successive secretaries of state, for example — a prevailing global narrative about the US has persisted; that it is an indelibly racist country and that black Americans remain an oppressed and entrenched underclass. It was a view I heard repeatedly, not only in this election season, but during my nearly 20 years as a foreign correspondent.

  If I mentioned the growth of the black middle class, or the number of black American chief executive officers running companies such as American Express, Time Warner and Kmart, or the increasing number of blacks with doctorates, I was usually met with stares of incredulity or slapped down by undeniable statistics.

  “So why are so many black men in prison?” a French friend asked me once.

  Another, in Hong Kong, asked: “So why are black people in your country all living in ghettos?”

  Of course, if I persisted there was always the trump card: Yes, but a black person can never be elected president in your country. Now along comes Obama, and much of the world, with its fixed image of the US — an image that is often as outdated as it is accurate — doesn’t know quite how to deal with his astonishing success.

  Consider the June front-page editorial in the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, which often sets the tone for the line officials are expected to take: “Obama’s skin color is the biggest focal point of this year’s US election,” it began. “He is a symbol of assimilation rather than a representative of the different races coming together. Obama did not break the superiority complex of white people. On the contrary, his appearance strengthened the superiority complex of white people.”

  Then there was the quote from a senior Japanese official — later denied — in the Shukan Bunshun weekly.

  “It will likely be McCain who will win the race in the end,” the official told reporters, according to the paper. “Obama’s black and Hillary [Clinton] is a woman. I guess it could be difficult for them.”

  The official added: “No matter what it looks like, the United States is a very conservative country.”

  For the record, when the official denied the remarks he said he had many “black friends.”

  If the reaction to Obama from Asia was skepticism, it was because it challenged some long-held views from a part of the world that too often sees a racial hierarchy based on skin color and complexion, with lighter skin being at the top of the pecking order and black at the bottom. When I lived in the Philippines, one of the common insults Filipinos made about each other centered on whether they were “too dark.”

  Around the region, light skin is prized. Perhaps that explains the gap-jawed, almost humorous reaction to the Obama win in some of the press.

  “Will Chinese benefit with a black man in charge?” asked the Xiamen Business Daily.

  “Dark horse enters White House” was the headline in the Information Times in Shanghai.

  My favorite was the front-page headline in the Philippine Daily Inquirer: “Black in the White House.”

  But it’s not just Asia. Europe has been in the grip of Obamania since he burst on to the world scene. But Obama’s ascent to the White House will also challenge deeply held European assumptions about the US and American blacks. In France, where I was based for five years, I was constantly asked about racism in the US — to a point where I found many French took our problems as affirmation of their own perfection of egalite.

  The view of the US as irretrievably racist has given others with their own racial problems a sense of superiority. It also robs the US of the moral high ground when it issues criticisms of the human rights violations of others. The US State Department issues an annual report on human rights around the world. In response China has begun issuing its own report on human rights in the US.

  This year, in the section on racial discrimination, it claimed: “Racial discrimination is a deep-rooted social illness in the United States.”

  The statistics quoted are mostly accurate but selective, chosen to highlight lingering problems while ignoring all the evidence of blacks and minorities entering the American economic mainstream.

  Then there is the view from Africa. When challenged on human rights, African autocrats have become deft at deflecting criticism from Europe and the US; Europeans are routinely reminded of their colonial past and Americans are chided for slavery and our sorry history of race relations. When I was covering Africa as a correspondent, I never found a good answer to that retort.

  “We try to own up to our own problems,” I would say. “Or, we’re not a perfect country, but that’s no excuse for gross rights violations elsewhere.”

  But I knew that the US’ ability to criticize was always going to be measured against the history of racism in America.

  Obama’s election, of course, does not mean the US has suddenly become a beacon of racial justice and harmony. Indeed, it’s one step — though, symbolically, as powerful a step as can be.

  As Howard Wolpe, director of the Africa program at the Wilson Center in Washington, so aptly put it in an interview: “The fact that someone of African ancestry can be the president of the United States is going to substantially increase our moral stature and enable us, I believe, to have much greater sway in our relationships with African states.”

  Or, in the words of Ugandan journalist and commentator Charles Onyango-Obbo, in a column written before the election: “If Obama is elected president, thousands of public intellectuals, radical professors and social activists and nationalist politicians and journalists will be plunged into crisis. Now they will have to explain how it is possible that a black person could be elected in this profoundly racist country.”

  Will an Obama administration change the status of all blacks in the US? Of course not. But his astounding victory is at least changing some perceptions about America. Already it is forcing the rest of the world to think again.

  Keith Richburg is New York bureau chief of the Washington Post.
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