Charles Johnson: on the meaning of Obama

He’s a person of extreme confidence, and he’s comfortable in his own skin, but he’s humble. He recognizes the brevity of his own resume. He’s perfectly aware that one of the best things you can do is bring together the best minds and listen to ideas, and come to a decision on the most credible information. It’s remarkable the people he’s pulled in.

And it’s not about ideology. That may disappoint some people who supported him, but I don’t think at heart Obama is an ideological man, primarily because his own biography is so global. He’s been all over the planet with so many different kinds of people. He’s a true culture hero from Kenya to Indonesia to Kansas.

RL: What do you mean by a culture hero?

CJ: A culture hero bears the dreams of a culture, the ideals of a culture. He is quite literally there. He cuts across so many areas. In Kenya, they referred to him as “Our Superpower Son.” It also involves the intelligentsia.

RL: I don’t know if we’re truly in a post-racial age, but the archaic term mulatto was never used in the campaign.

CJ: I think the current term is biracial. Obama calls himself a mutt. But so many Americans are. We all have a mixture of something. The external [features] of a person are really cosmetic. We go back about 50 generations and we all share a common ancestor. He’s related to [Vice President Dick] Cheney through his mother. That’s reality. But we have dumb attitudes that date back to a more racist and stupid period in American history. Another reason he’s a culture hero is because he’s an avatar for a new vision of understanding race relations in American.

RL: How is Obama an avatar?

CJ: Avatar is a Hindu word for a god, but I’m using it as someone who represents something. He and Michelle represent the entire professional class of black Americans for the last two generations in the post-civil rights period. Both of them are extremely well educated and highly successful professionals. Those are their values. He’s a young urban professional [and his identity] resides in his work. And probably something true of his generation and the young people after him, was beginning to be true of mine. I’m primarily defined by what I do [not] by where I was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois. I went to school in New York and live here [Seattle]. That old sense of geography being destiny is not true, and certainly not in an age like ours in a global village connected by the Internet. We live in a very different world, and Obama represents that world.

RL: You’re a renowned student of Dr. King’s life. What do you think he’d say at this time?

CJ: I think he would be joyous — extraordinarily happy. He would feel this is a fulfillment — not necessarily the complete fulfillment of the dream of black Americans in the civil rights movement — but enormously important. You get past some of the delusions or illusions, and it’s hard for those to continue across generations when younger generations are better educated.

RL: In a 2003 interview you said, “We won’t, I believe, ever have King’s ‘color blind’ society (or world), and I’m doubtful that humankind can ever shake off the easy tendency to project generalizations onto racial ‘difference.’” Has your view changed?

CJ: What’s changed is the ability of a majority of Americans to feel that race is irrelevant in their election of the president. What’s most important, as demonstrated, is their trust in the person and that person’s intelligence and professionalism. That doesn’t mean that American society still isn’t saddled with racial misunderstanding. I came across an Obama doll somebody had done during the primaries [that] was basically a monkey with a tail and big ears, and they took it off the market quickly. Maybe 50 years ago they wouldn’t have had the pressure to take it off the market. There’s still someone who’s going to do something ignorant like that.

We can’t say we have a color-blind society at this moment because we do not. If you look at our English department where I’ve taught for 33 years, I’m the only black faculty here out of about 50 people. I think they recently hired a young woman who I haven’t met yet, so there may be two of us.

RL: Just walking on campus, I didn’t see many African-American students.

CJ: Hardly any. So they do have a problem. And we have far more black females graduating from college and getting master’s degrees and PhD’s than we do black males. And there are terrible figures. One out of nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are either in prison or on parole — somehow controlled by the criminal justice system.