Will Foreigners Accept Obama?

“Will Americans vote for a black man?” I think I’ve been asked this question by foreigners of various origins a dozen times — or maybe three dozen times — since the American presidential campaign began for real last January.Now we have the answer: Yes, Americans will vote for a black man. Which means that it is now time to turn this rather offensive question around the other way: Will foreigners accept a black American president?I realize that this too may seem like a rather offensive question, particularly if one believes everything that one reads in the newspapers. Germany, to take one random example, is at the moment experiencing something like its own version of Obamamania.The press appears to see the Democratic candidate as what a Der Spiegel journalist calls “a cross between John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King”; the German foreign minister has already been heard chanting “yes, we can!”; and Obama t-shirts can be spotted in the hipper quarters of Berlin.This sort of enthusiasm isn’t unique to Germany, either: the British, French, and even the Polish newspapers splashed Senator Obama and his candidacy on all of their front pages this week, most accompanied by laudatory articles which solemnly proclaimed that “America has changed.”But has Europe changed? And have Asia and the Middle East changed? I hate to put it so crudely but — European newspaper reporting to the contrary — racism is not a phenomenon unique to America.The situation of ethnic minorities in Europe and Asia is completely different from that of America, and in many ways our societies aren’t comparable: Most non-white inhabitants of European societies are recent immigrants, not descendants of former slaves, and the particular situation of, say, the black Christian population in Arab-dominated Sudan, is unique.Nevertheless, it is safe to say that there is a distinct dearth of non-white politicians in Europe. The Indian caste system has an element of skin-color discrimination built into it. Arab societies have their own history of trading in black slaves, and the existence of anti-black-African prejudice in the Arab world is no secret. Periodically, African students in Moscow get beaten up on the streets.Though certainly more severe in those countries which actually have large non-white populations, unreflective racism exists even in parts of the world which have barely any darker-skinned or non-native inhabitants at all.Japan has been singled out by the United Nations for racist treatment of foreigners. And while some of the stares that black Americans say they get on the street in Warsaw or Prague reflect simple curiosity, some, I’m told, contain an element of hostility too.President Obama wouldn’t have to worry too much about angry stares from people at bus stops, of course, and it is fair to assume that prejudices harbored by the odd foreign leader will vanish in the presence of the American president.In the rosiest scenario, an Obama presidency — or just an Obama candidacy — might even force a broader international discussion of race. Andrew Sullivan last year wrote eloquently about the way in which Mr. Obama’s face, just by itself, will help change America’s image around the world.By the same token, candidate Obama — merely by being who he is, and looking like what he looks like — could begin to change European, Arab, and Asian attitudes about race. Millions of Africans would surely treat an American president of African descent as “their” president, just for a start.But in the meantime, do not be surprised if there is some backlash as well. A hint of what might be hiding behind those enthusiastic headlines emerged last week in Obamamanic Germany, where a Berlin newspaper, Die Tageszeitung, put a photograph of the White House and the headline “Uncle Barack’s Cabin” on its front page.The editors argued that their intention was satirical, but since the same newspaper has also referred to the current U.S. secretary of state as “Uncle Tom’s Rice,” it is clear that they understood the nastiness of the “Uncle Tom” connotation perfectly well.Listen carefully, too, when foreigners start worrying about Senator Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience. Though this is a perfectly legitimate concern, I do think I occasionally catch a racist undertone in this kind of conversation. “How could a black man possibly understand European/Middle Eastern/South Asian politics,” is what my interlocutors sometimes in fact seem to be saying.The correct response, of course, is that plenty of white men don’t understand European/Middle Eastern/South Asian politics either. But not everyone, everywhere, is going to understand that. Foreign coverage of American politics always shows a lot about foreign countries, but never more so than in this election season.© 2008 The Washington Post

Will Foreigners Accept Obama?

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