“God damn America.” These three words, without context or explanation, might have emerged from any number of sources: a laid-off worker, an irreverent comedian, a black pastor, a person who has lost family or friends in conflict. In their exclamation, these speakers grasp to articulate complex grievances with the United States, but settle on the simplicity of righteous indignation.
Does this short verbal assault on the United States, usually expressed in service of a larger point, represent a slight against the ideals of the soldiers and social workers, business people and bureaucrats, community organizers and others who collectively define America? I don’t think so, but it was nearly enough to sink the career of our new president.
In the week before March 18, 2008, the United States fixated on these words, spoken by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, after sound bites of his sermons appeared on YouTube. The clips beamed from cable news channels into the homes of hundreds of millions of Americans.
For some, the attention paid to this story legitimized questions about Barack Obama’s true loyalty to the United States. “How could he sit for 20 years in the pews of an America-bashing organization,” so-called conservatives disingenuously wondered. Stoked by conservative talk radio and FOX News, some began to imagine Reverend Wright’s congregation as an internal danger threatening the traditional power structure, complete with a hallucinated black power uprising.
President-elect Obama responded by delivering a speech on race in Philadelphia on March 18. “I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas,” Obama said in that speech, mapping for Americans the complexities of our collective heritage, the debts and bonds that we owe to each other. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners — an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”
In the end, to many people’s amazement, the professorial brand of politics won out against the politics of personal destruction.
Obama’s message is spreading. In Germany, where millions of Turkish people have started new lives since World War II and have been marginalized in politics (and other areas), Cem Ozdemir, an ethnic Turk, was recently chosen to lead a large political party. In France, where an ideology based on dated notions of “colorblindness” prevents affirmative efforts to improve the lives of a large minority population, hope has sprung that a political consensus will emerge to tackle racial issues in a proactive way.
As the French political analyst Dominique Mo√É.√Øsi said in a recent New York Times article, “In this election, the Americans not only chose a president, but also their identity.” What identity? One of inclusiveness and respect for difference, one that acknowledges that strength comes through diversity of ideas, one that seeks understanding and would not turn on its own members because of a few disagreeable words.