I’m Not The Only One

The next class assignment was due this week and required me to flat out describe the proposal for my research paper. It’s a bit long, but I feel it’s a pretty good attempt at describing the complexity of what Obama Barack’s Presidential campaign represents in so many ways.

*************

The topic I plan to investigate for my research paper is how much of a challenge the Presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama is to the nationwide concept of what an American President should embody.

This particular research question to me is a profound one because we live in a country where 42 of the 43 people who have served as President of the United States have been Caucasian, Anglo-Saxon Protestant men (The U.S. has only elected one President, John F. Kennedy who was a Catholic Irish-American). Given this 200 plus-year consistency of nationally elected leaders, it is easy for non-Americans and even many Americans to conceive of the United States as a white country, with a marginalized racial minority population that is not even an afterthought.

Barack Obama unintentionally but boldly challenges so many ideals of what many people, domestically and internationally, perceive an American President to be. His full name alone, Barack Hussein Obama, invokes the culture of the very terrorist organizations with whom we are embroiled in a deadly and complicated war unlike any other conflict this country has fought. Some entertainers and political pundits joke that his name sounds like Iraq Osama, making Obama’s name seem more like the clever moniker of a fictional character in a politically-oriented novel rather than the birth name of an existing American. Obama’s international upbringing sets him far apart from other Americans, most of whom do not even own a passport, and a universe away from our current President whose only venture outside of the United States was less than a mile from the state where he served as governor.

Obama also challenges Americans’ ideas of what capacity in which a black person should live in America. African-Americans, who make up the historical and numerical majority of black people in the United States, are often thought of as dominating the arenas of professional sports, the arts, and entertainment, and basically staying out of most other aspects of American society. For example, even in 2007, despite the monumental progress made throughout the 20th Century in regards to racial equality, Obama is the only the fifth person of African descent to serve in the United States Senate as well as the only current U.S. Senator of African descent.

While Obama defies mainstream America’s expectations of what a person of color should be, even African-Americans cannot say Obama embodies the historical and cultural aspects of their community. His father, an African immigrant from Kenya, never experienced Jim Crow nor did his ancestors ever endure slavery. Obama is also unique from other African-American leaders in the sense that he is too young to ever have participated in the 60s-era Civil Rights movement. With Obama being raised outside of the continental U.S. and abroad for the majority of his childhood, it can be said that neither he nor his family ever experienced the modern-day soft bigotry that permeates today’s African-American community.

Obama is often referred to as the black candidate, thanks to our society’s archaic “one-drop” system which unofficially classifies children of an interracial black-white marriage as black. But he is in fact biracial, a cultural, social and political anomaly which defies the age-old American custom of stuffing people into neat little categories for various purposes. His candidacy represents a new age in America, one that proverbially spits in the face of the traditional age in America in which traditional white privilege places nonwhites and mixed race people in a segregated, marginalized class. The possible Presidential election of Barack Obama just may symbolize the culmination, the crowning achievement of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

My research question is certainly not one that can be answered in one sentence, or even one paragraph or one page. With the complexity of Barack Obama’s cultural and political background, the complexity of American race relations in its historical and contemporary contexts, and the rigid constituency of the ethnic and cultural makeup of America’s past Presidents, I seriously doubt this convoluted (some may say loaded) question can be answered in eight to ten pages, but I will certainly try my best to do so.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 12:20 am and is filed under 2008 Presidential Race, Politics, Personal, Race & Ethnicity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.