A Black Man
in the White House
By Ayesha Ijaz Khan
US
Who is this man Barack Obama?
Or, Barack Hussein Obama, as FOX news insists
on calling him. Senator from Illinois, born to
a white mother and Kenyan father, spent time in
Indonesia and Hawaii. All of that I knew. What
I didn’t know however was that his name
is not pronounced the way we pronounce army barrack,
for instance, but is derived from the Arabic baraka,
the blessings of God. And this correct pronunciation
of his name is important to him, unlike the Syed
I met in college in the United States many years
ago, who told other students to “just call
me Ed.”
Obama’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango
Obama, rejected Christianity and converted to
Islam, Obama writes in his soul-searching memoir,
“because he could not understand such ideas
as mercy towards your enemies, or that this man
Jesus could wash away a man’s sins.”
To Hussein Obama, “this was a foolish sentiment,
something to comfort women,” and so he converted
to Islam as its practices were more in line with
his beliefs. I like it. And so, read further from
Barack Obama’s first book, Dreams from My
Father, which he wrote in 1995, well before his
entry into politics, when he was still a student
at Harvard Law School.
Elected as the first African-American president
of the Harvard Law Review, he was offered an advance
by a publisher to tell his story and the story
of his family. This is a book about origins, about
hopes and dreams and about a remarkable journey
commencing in Hawaii, where Obama’s parents
met as his father had a scholarship as an international
student to study at the University of Hawaii.
His mother’s family, native to Kansas, had
settled in Hawaii, and liberal though they were
in spite of their mid-western heritage, nevertheless
had to cope with the surprise of their daughter
marrying a black man!
Complicating matters further, Obama’s father
had left behind a first wife and children in Kenya
when he arrived in Hawaii and once he finished
his degree there, was offered enrolment at a PhD
program at Harvard, but no financial assistance.
That meant that young Barack Obama and his mother
had to stay back in Hawaii. When his father finished
his education at Harvard, he returned to Kenya.
The marriage dissipated and Obama’s mother
married an Indonesian, again a Muslim, and moved
to Jakarta with Barack.
“In Indonesia, I had spent two years at
a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school,”
Obama notes in his memoir. The rest of the time,
he spent running the streets with other brown-skinned
children, “catching crickets, battling swift
kites with razor-sharp lines,” and learning
first-hand “the chasm that separated the
life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian.”
Here is a man who understands the plight of the
Third World, who remembers vividly the beggars
in Indonesia, the man “with a gaping hole
where his nose should have been,” for instance,
“the whistling sound he made when he asked
[his] mother for food.”
It is a scene not too dissimilar from what one
sees when stopped at a traffic light on the main
Shaheen-Shamsheer intersection of Karachi Defense.
But imagine having a man in the White House who
recollects such scenes as part of his childhood
memories, like they are a part of ours. Contrast
that with George Bush arriving in Pakistan, when
the streets of our capital are cleansed of any
potential beggars, lurking terrorists or innocent
bystanders alike. Or with Bill Clinton, hovering
about his aircraft, all too hesitant to discover
what the real Pakistan may have to offer.
But Obama is different. Not only because of his
heritage, but because of his willingness to understand
and therefore truly sympathize with the nuance
of race, the hardship of economics, of living
in a white man’s world, by the white man’s
rules, the difficulty of living as a minority,
as an outsider. “It wasn’t that Europe
wasn’t beautiful,” he writes when
he makes a stopover on his way to Nairobi, “it
just wasn’t mine.”
And so he returns to what was his, deliberately
establishing his roots in the financially hard-hit
primarily black community of the South Side of
Chicago, marrying a black woman, a fellow lawyer,
and spending his time organizing those who have
been born on the wrong side of the divide. His
success has not been an impediment to his affinity
with the small guy however, a quality perhaps
that he inherited from his father. “Your
father was very popular in these parts,”
his uncle Sayid tells Obama when he visits his
father’s village in Kenya. “Whenever
he came home…people here…would tell
him, ‘You are a big man, but you have not
forgotten us.’”
Still, Obama ponders the difficulty success poses,
“the same perverse survivor’s guilt,”
he calls it, “that I could expect to experience
if I ever did try to make money and had to pass
the throngs of young black men on the corner as
I made my way to a downtown office.” I am
reminded of Pakistan again and the guilt many
of us feel when we sit in air-conditioned cars
in the heat of June and are surrounded by young
barefoot children peering at us, their noses stuck
to the car window. “Without power for the
group,” he concludes, “our success
always threatened to leave others behind.”
Obama is a better man for his involvement with
that larger group. That larger group on Chicago’s
South Side included followers of Louis Farakhan’s
Nation of Islam whose version of religion rests
on an utter rejection and disgust for anything
white. Obama, though he expresses regard for Malcolm
X, clearly does not agree in any way with Farakhan
or the Nation of Islam. Nevertheless, he acknowledges,
“I came to see how the blanket indictment
of everything white served a central function
in their message of uplift.” Here is a pragmatic
man who uses logic and not emotions to arrive
at his decisions. I cannot picture Obama refusing
to speak to Iran’s Ahmedenijad, for example,
simply because his view of the world may be diametrically
opposed to America’s.
On the contrary, Obama would in all likelihood
go the extra mile to negotiate, in the interest
of peace, to understand the root causes of disputes.
He understands acutely and mentions frequently
in his book the effects of colonialism and the
resulting difficulties in creating a new world
order. I cannot picture him authorizing therefore
a browbeating of Pakistan, nor issuing ultimatums
in the name of the war on terror. He speaks fondly
in fact of “Pakistani friends…back
in the States, friends who had supported black
causes, friends who had lent me money when I was
tight and taken me into their homes when I’d
had no place to stay.”
Given the America we have seen of late, it is
hard sometimes to even imagine that he is a candidate
for the US presidential race. It sounds just too
good to be true. But miracles do happen. With
all of Hillary’s clout and the anti-Obama
crowd rushing out with T-shirts likening him to
Osama, Obama was still able to raise funds almost
equal to those of Mrs. Clinton. What’s more
is that his funds came from a much larger group,
the average donor contributing less than a hundred
dollars. The disenfranchised Americans it seems
have finally found themselves a real leader.
A charismatic level-headed family man in his mid-forties
with no Monica Lewinsky or Whitewater skeletons
hanging in his closet, a man who understands the
Muslim viewpoint as much as he does the Christian,
who believes the Holocaust is not the only tragedy
meriting remembrance, who was always against military
action in Iraq, and who can assimilate equally
in white, black and brown cultures. A perfect
solution — the ideal leader to redeem post-9/11
America in the eyes of the world — an international
man with the best of credentials yet who comprehends
and empathizes with the poverty of the Third World,
the resentment of the have-nots and really cares
about making the world a fair place. I am not
a US citizen, but if I were and had a vote, I
would look no further than Obama.
