It is so important that the first black President is only half-black. The black side of Barack Obama’s heritage is the non-American bit. His black, Kenyan father was absent. His Hawaiian upbringing was white. One day, he recalls in his autobiography, his white grandparents, who were bringing him up, had a row. His grandmother (who died this week, just too soon to see her grandson elected), told her husband that she did not want to take the bus to work the next day. She asked her husband to drive her instead. He refused, and words were exchanged. Barack asked what was going on. His grandfather told him that she had been harassed at the bus-stop for money. He was annoyed with her because what frightened her particularly about the incident was that the aggressive panhandler had been black. Young Barack thought about this: his grandparents had ‘sacrificed again and again for me… and yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears’. Nothing in Obama’s attitudes or demeanour inspires raw fear. The racist caricature of a black man is of an ape. Obama is a cat. He is agile and stylish and somehow alone. His beautifully judged acceptance speech was cool. As he became part of American history, he spoke almost as an observer of it. Quite right to remind his audience that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, quite right to say to those who did not vote for him ‘I will be your President too’; but the intelligence, the historical sweep, the ability to understand more than one perspective are the opposite qualities of those of the ghetto. His blackness seems skin-deep, which is why people can accept it.
‘Not by the might of our arms, or the scale of our wealth, but for the enduring power of our ideals’ is America the greatest nation, said Obama.
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