Editor's note: The election of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, brought a surge of hope about U.S. race relations. More than three years later, as we once again mark Black History Month, where do things stand? Here is one of three commentaries by San Diegans on the topic.
If he could visit 21st-century America, Alexis de Tocqueville would be amazed to find Barack Obama, an African-American, as president of the United States. However, he would not be surprised to find that, despite this powerful symbolism of progress, race is still a divisive force in the country.
Following his tour of this young nation in the 19th century, Tocqueville, a French historian and political activist, published “Democracy in America” in 1835. In this book, he described slavery as “the most formidable evil threatening the future of the United States.” Aware of the growing impetus to abolish this practice, Tocqueville noted, “I see that slavery is in retreat, but the prejudice from which it arose is immovable.”
173 years later, Americans elected an African American to hold the highest office in the nation. During election eve on Nov. 4, 2008, many wept, shared their enthusiasm with friends and family across the country, and actually believed that this was it: the end of racial strife in America. Given the nation’s difficult journey from slavery and its abolition, from Jim Crow laws and their dissolution, from segregation and its demise, to the continuing civil rights struggle to eliminate the vestiges of this dark history, Barack Obama’s election was heralded by many as the start of a new era of equality and racial peace.
As an African-American and as someone who grew up in a segregated Southern city, I was among those whose emotions and hopes were buoyed by the election of President Obama. I was further impressed by his strenuous effort to divest himself of the adjectival description that would both define him by race and limit that definition to only one aspect of his biracial identity. He was on the verge, I thought, of transcending stereotypes and personifying his captivating vision of “one America.”
As the years of Barack Obama’s presidency ensued, I became disheartened by the nation’s refusal to allow him to be the president, not the African-American president. He became a lightning rod for extremely divergent views, conflicting interests and divided expectations. Some white opponents exhibited despicable disrespect, such as Rep. Joe Wilson’s shout, “You lie!” during a joint session of Congress in 2009 and the imagery of President Obama’s face superimposed upon the body of a chimpanzee in a widely distributed email by Orange County political figure Marilyn Davenport.
Some African-Americans have also been vocal in their displeasure, such as civil rights leader Jesse Jackson’s complaint about Barack Obama’s “talking down to black people,” comments that were inadvertently picked up by a live microphone during a Fox News interview in 2008. Princeton Professor Cornel West has expressed deep frustration with President Obama’s efforts to appeal to a broader population of Americans, at one point calling him “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”
In my view, the election of Barack Obama has indeed brought about huge change for America through its powerful symbolism and the fact that an important ceiling has been shattered as a result. The message is that in 21st-century America, everyone has a chance to succeed, irrespective of race. America’s greater challenge will be to allow the man we elected to do the job for which we elected him by dropping, once and for all, the polarizing focus on race.
Carroll is chancellor of the three-campus San Diego Community College District.