Lionel Shriver

Not Just A Black Man, But The Black Man

One could persuasively argue that every event under the sun is historic, since it happened, and thus contributes in however modest a manner to history. But in the connotative sense of groundbreaking, of marking a turning point from which there is no going back, of identifying a watershed that subsequent generations will point to as when something crucial changed forever, the word ‘historic’ in political commentary is sorely overused.

Nevertheless, I’m going to use it. On last Friday’s Newsnight Review, broadcast from New York, the critic Joe Queenan was dismissive of all the hoo-ha about how America’s 2008 presidential election is of such paramount importance. ‘It’s just another election,’ he said, waving his hand. Ordinarily I am sympathetic with such insistence on perspective, and I would commonly share Queenan’s intelligent resistance to the cult of modernity, the myopia of the present. But in this one instance I beg to differ. This is not just another election.

In the context of a country built with African slave labour, a country that fought a bloody civil war over slavery, a country many of whose greatest social upheavals have been rooted in race, a country that has wrestled since its founding with all men being ‘created equal’ in theory and black men being treated as nothing of the kind in practice, well... For the first black presidential nominee by a major political party to not only have a viable crack at the White House but, as of this writing, to be leading in the polls by a significant margin? That is historic.

I wouldn’t be the first commentator to observe that Barack Obama’s election could be even more salutary for American whites than for blacks, but I would join that chorus. Obama can only be elected with the support of the white electorate. If he prevails, whites like me will be able to take partial credit for this national achievement. From early on, his honky constituency has exuded more than a hint of self-congratulation – or, to be kinder, justifiable pride. Apologies for striking the messianic overtones surrounding ‘The One’ that Republicans so detest, but my Protestant heritage sometimes rears its ugly head: Obama’s candidacy cleanses my sins.

Born in 1957, I grew up in North Carolina and Georgia during the civil rights movement, in which my father was actively involved. Throughout my adulthood, I have watched that movement corrupt, distorting its message of equality by embracing well-intended but pernicious affirmative action, elevating opportunists like Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan, who market victimization as a commodity, and who answer racism with racism in return. Yet the Obama campaign seems to somehow come out the other side of all that: its message of unity not division, its language of optimism not self-pity, its broad multi-racial base an implicit rejection of the old identity politics.

What is especially exhilarating about this candidate is that he is not just any black man who will do. This is no token. Right, it might be nice if he had a tad more experience. Yet otherwise you couldn’t ask for more: intelligent, eloquent, elegant, poised, and possessed of that rare capacity to be genuinely moving. Cool under pressure, the man exudes an improbable self-discipline. Thus his detractors’ frequent assertion that after Obama’s two solid years on the campaign trail they ‘still don’t know who he is’ surely decodes as ‘try as we might, we’ve never once got this guy to lose his rag!’ Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democrat Vice-Presidential candidate who supported Hillary Clinton in this year’s primaries, believes that Obama would not be a viable candidate for president if he weren’t black. But the truth is, this black man would not be a viable candidate for president if he weren’t Obama.

Lionel Shriver’s seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, won the 2005 Orange Prize. Her most recent novel, The Post-Birthday World, is published by HarperCollins. She has written for the Guardian, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. She lives in London.