Rorschach President: How Barack Obama personifies the anxieties ...

Rorschach President: How Barack Obama
personifies the anxieties and aspirations
of America
Thank you very much Baroness Blackstone. Thank you Philip Davies,
who has done all the work behind the scenes to get me here. And thank
you for coming.
I know that these Douglas Bryant lectures have a proud history of the
spirited exchange of opinions between Europe and America in general,
and Britain and America in particular, and I’m very honoured to be
included in it.
But I come not just in the tradition of the transatlantic but also the Black
Atlantic. That diaspora that has shuttled between Africa, the Americas and
Europe either through coercion, as my forbears did as slaves, or through
voluntary migration, as my parents did from Barbados. So I have got one
foot in the perspective of the likes of Alexis De Tocqueville, that great
French observer of American mores; but the other with the mindset of the
likes of CLR James, that great Trinidadian intellectual who wrote
on everything from the politics of cricket to the Haitian revolution.
So when I arrived in the United States with that perspective, it was with
great bemusement that I found myself having to absorb abuse, particularly
from white, right-wing Americans, who badgered me as though their own
reference points represented the sole prism through which global events
could possibly be understood. As though the struggle for moral superiority
between Europe and the US could have much relevance to someone whose
ancestors were slaves, and whose parents and grandparents lived through the
war under European colonization. In the run-up to the Iraq war one white
American said to me: ‘If it wasn’t for us you would be speaking German.’
‘No,’ I told him. ‘If it wasn’t for you, I would probably be speaking Yoruba.’
So it was with that perspective that I witnessed the rise of Barack Obama.
First in the Senate race, then in his campaign for the presidency, and then