The Long, Lingering Shadow by Cottrol Robert J.;Finkelman Paul;Huebner Timothy S.;

Author:Cottrol, Robert J.;Finkelman, Paul;Huebner, Timothy S.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

From Emancipation to Equality

CHAPTER SEVEN

An American Sea Change

THE LAW’S POWER AND LIMITATIONS

NO EVENT BETTER ILLUSTRATES the determination of Americans in the first decade of the twenty-first century to turn their backs on the twentieth-century legacy of Jim Crow than the election of Barack Hussein Obama as president on November 4, 2008. Many Americans, including many who indicated that they had not voted for him, expressed satisfaction at the election’s outcome. The Tea Party movement, disagreements over health care legislation and Afghanistan, and strong dissatisfaction with a stubbornly depressed economy and the partisan bickering to which every president is heir, these would come in the future. But on that Election Day, in November most Americans were pleased. A number of commentators expressed the view that the election was a harbinger of a new day for the American republic, an indication that the nation had finally put race behind it. Some went so far — prematurely, in my view — as to herald a new “postracial America,” one in which the old divisions no longer mattered. Others demonstrated that they had forgotten a major component of the nation’s racial history. They asked, “Why is Obama being proclaimed as the nation’s first black president? His father was one of the Luo people of Kenya, it is true, but his mother was after all a white American. Shouldn’t he be considered multiracial?” In any event, most Americans recognized him as the nation’s first black president and, if the press reports and polling data are accurate, seemed to have taken no small measure of satisfaction from the nation’s accomplishment.1

And it was not only in the United States that the election was applauded. Heralded around the world, the election was cheered as evidence of a new day in the United States. The news was proclaimed with banner headlines by the world’s newspapers. More important, in the still young twenty-first century, the election of the American nation’s first black president was greeted with great enthusiasm by the talking heads of the world’s insatiable television news services. But the enthusiasm spread far beyond the headlines and sound bites proffered by professional pundits and journalists. It could be found around the world. In Kenya, birthplace of Obama’s father, enthusiastic crowds carried the Stars and Stripes through the streets of Nairobi. There was an air of popular enthusiasm for the election throughout the world, partly a reflection of the unpopularity of the outgoing Bush administration, partly a reflection of the amazement that the United States, of all places, would elect a black president.2

For many, the image of the American nation had remained frozen in time. The United States was the home of Jim Crow, a nation of violent racists, the land of racial oppression. The stereotype in its crudest form was woefully out of date. By the time Obama had gained his substantial electoral and popular victory over Arizona senator John McCain, the United States had already changed in ways that would have made it unrecognizable to Americans who had lived through the Jim Crow years of the early and middle parts of the old century.

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