No black in the White House
(The writer is a business executive and former Caribbean diplomat)
By Sir Ronald Sanders

( Photo ) Sir Ronald Sanders

I start this commentary by declaring that I would like Barack Obama’s to be elected President of the United States, not because he is part black, but because of his perspective of the United States as a country and his perception of the United States in the world.
Note that I say he is ‘part black’, for indeed he is also ‘part white’.
It is amazing that the world has adopted, almost without question, the methodology of Apartheid in measuring who is ‘black’ and who is ‘white’.
So, Obama has become an “African-American” because his father is an African from Kenya, but he is not a “European-American” because his mother is white from America.
The latter fact is discounted altogether in this adoption of a myopic and profoundly racialist system that makes a person “black”, if he has a jot of African blood. The world has fallen prey to the dogma of white-racial purity established by minority white regimes that ruled parts of Africa on the basis of their self-declared racial superiority.
A product of mixed races myself, I have always found it impossible to denounce people on the basis of race or to be prejudiced against them because of the colour of their skin. For by doing so, I would put into that collective of denunciation and prejudice, members of my own family.
Obama clearly feels the same. He writes of his early childhood growing up with his mother’s parents in the US: “That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind.”
In this regard, Barack Obama is no different from me, or, I suspect, many other mixed race people. I further suspect that, like many of us of mixed race, he is colour blind. And when he speaks out against injustice meted out to black people in the United States, he does so not because he favours black people over white, but because he favours right over wrong.
For instance, he says: “Those who worked on civil rights in the past realized that to achieve racial equality was not simply good for African-Americans, but it was good for America as a whole… We live in a society that remains separated in terms of life opportunities for African-Americans, for Latinos, and the rest of the nation. And it is absolutely critical for us to recognize that there are going to be responsibilities on the part of African-Americans and other groups to take personal responsibility to rise up out of the problems that we face. But there has also got to be a social responsibility, there has to be a sense of mutual responsibility, and there’s got to be political will in the White House to make that happen”.

Those words were spoken not from a prepared text but in a spontaneous response to a question during an interview.
Based on the views that he has expressed so strongly up and down the US in his campaign to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for the Presidency, if he were to become President and his perspective triumphed over the many other contrary views that would be presented to him by Washington bureaucrats, the world would be a safer place, and so too would be the US.
Last July writing in the journal, Foreign Affairs, Obama called for an outward looking US foreign policy and the renewal of American military, diplomatic, and moral leadership in the world, saying: “We can neither retreat from the world nor try to bully it into submission.” And, he called on Americans to “lead the world, by deed and by example.”
Closer to home, his position on Cuba - the one Caribbean country to which US policy makers pay serious attention – he has stated his willingness to begin bilateral talks with the government in Havana, “to normalize relations and ease the embargo that has governed relations between our countries for the last five decades.”
This position contrasts with his contenders including Hilary Clinton who has stated categorically that she favours maintaining the economic embargo against Cuba.
But despite the fact that I would like Obama to be the next occupant of the White House, I will stick-out my neck and say it won’t happen. And, in the process of his defeat, Hilary Clinton will also be a casualty and the Republican candidate – most likely John McCain – will be elected President.
At the end of the so-called “Super Tuesday” on February 5th, Obama and Clinton were still neck-and-neck for the Democratic nomination.
To the surprise of many people in the Caribbean, the Hispanics favoured Clinton over Obama. Why it was a surprise, I am not sure. For any Caribbean person who has dealt with Hispanics would be well aware that black people in their societies are still at the bottom of the totem pole.
One study in the US by Paula McClain, a political scientist at Duke University in North Carolina, showed that “Latinos tend to identify more with whites than blacks”. According to reports, the entrance poll of Nevada caucus-goers, 64 per cent of Hispanic voters favoured Clinton to just 25 per cent for Obama.
This obsession with race remains a reality of the US. In this context, when it comes to it – even if Obama does triumph over Clinton – for the Democratic nomination, the knee-jerk reaction of America will be ‘no black in the White House’. The Republican would win. I hope I am wrong, for it is time for the US to grow-up.
Responses to: ronaldsanders29@hotmail.com