Allt det Obama inte är

Om man har läst ett halvdussin böcker om Obama förändras knappast synen på honom av det pågående mediadrevet om hans pastor. Men de flesta amerikaner har ju inte läst ett halvdussin böcker om Obama (var sjätte väljare tror fortfarande att han är muslim).

För mig framstår hans pastor mest som en tydlig kontrast till det Obama inte är. Polariserande, aggressiv, lätt paranoid.
Jag har varit på den där kyrkan i Chicago, och det var ingen särskilt trevlig erfarenhet, men jag kan leva med det.

Darryl Pinckney har skrivit en av de bättre artiklar jag läst om Obama, ras och nationell identitet i USA (egentligen handlar den om Shelby Steeles ”A bound man”):

”In The Audacity of Hope, Obama goes on record, again, on a range of issues, from his qualified support of abortion to his opposition to the war in Iraq. At the same time, he wants to demonstrate that just because he is a black legislator it doesn’t follow that his votes in the Senate can be predicted:
’I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or victimhood generally.’
In writing about his understanding of our political history, it is as though the Constitution’s system of checks and balances reflects his dual heritage, his desire to reconcile in his person and in his policies the polarized nation.

/…/ Obama’s white grandparents informed his identity as a black man, but maybe not as the antidote to blackness Steele imagines. They fled Kansas and ended up in Hawaii, disappointed but decent people. Maybe the myth of his father was a comfort in the way that the sound of his grandfather, trying to sell insurance from home, making humiliating phone calls Sunday nights, was not. Obama’s white girlfriend was rich, and class as much as race may have been the thing about her life that made him feel like such an outsider. What perhaps informs Obama’s desire to be inclusive as a black candidate is his feeling for the insecure white America that doesn’t recognize itself in the images of middle-class well-being.

/…/

Steele accuses Obama of presenting himself as a protester to blacks and a unifier to whites. But when he holds that Obama cannot serve the aspirations of one race without betraying those of the other, it is Steele, calling black people blackmailers, who seems out of date and most threatened by Obama’s candidacy..”