Obama; from pre-racial to post-racial world
Prof. Ali A. Mazrui
Can there be such a phenomenon as a post-racial society? Here we need to
distinguish between a post-racial society and a post-racism era. A post-racial
society is one that has not only abandoned racism as a form of racial bigotry
but has also shed race-consciousness as a residual mode of defining a group.
Although difficult, outgrowing racism can be attained sooner than the
disappearance of race as a demographic category. South Africa will probably
outgrow racism by about the middle of this twenty-first century. But it may
take the same South Africa an additional full century to outgrow
race-consciousness.
In post-colonial Africa it is infinitely easier to imagine a post-tribal
society than a post-racial society. While many African societies were still
basically ‘tribal’ at the time of independence, there has been an unrelenting
effort to get beyond tribalism as a form of intolerance while still accepting
boundaries of tribal identities.
In the pre-feudal days Western society was at one time pre-tribal. Then most
Western European countries became tribal and feudal. And from the Treaty of
Westphalia onwards Western Europe became more national and post-tribal, except
in places like Scotland where clan loyalties remained powerful and compelling.
If periods of national history can be pre-tribal, tribal or post-tribal, why
cannot periods of continental history also be either pre-racial, racial or
post-racial? It is possible to argue that while much of pre-colonial Africa was
basically tribal, the continent south of the Sahara was still essentially
pre-racial. Much of pre-colonial Africa knew little about either race or racism
before large scale penetration by the Arabs and the more spectacular arrival of
Europeans.
To the present day, most African languages have no word for ‘race’ different
from the word for ‘tribe.’ In Kiswahili both ‘race’ and ‘tribe’ are referred to
as kabila, a word borrowed from the Arabic language. In Africa, European
penetration racialised political life in colonised Africa. The question since
the end of political apartheid is whether we are slowly evolving toward a world
that is not only post-racism but may eventually become post-racial.
In the Black Atlantic world, there is a transition from the pre-racism world of
Shakespeare’s Othello to the potentially post-racism America of Barack Obama.
In Othello’s Venice, race-consciousness was indeed widely manifest from time to
time. What was still less developed and obviously rare was the kind of racism
that could lynch a Black man for engaging in inter-racial sex.
Of all the countries with a white majority population, the one that was
earliest to make room for a man of colour to be the absolute best in cultural
creativity was Czarist Russia. Indeed, Russia’s supreme literary hero has
continued to be Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837), one regarded as more than
Russia’s Shakespeare. Pushkin remains not only Russia’s greatest poet, but also
a great novelist, dramatist and short-story writer. In his versatile genius,
Pushkin is widely acknowledged as the founder of modern Russian literature.
Yet, by American definitions of a black person, Pushkin was indeed a man of
colour. His mother was the granddaughter of an Ethiopian prince ling who was
bought as a slave from Constantinople. Pushkin is said to have been adopted by
Peter the Great and later fought alongside the Czar as his comrade-in-arms.
In North America, it took much longer than a century before such upward racial
mobility was even conceivable. But in 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy envisaged
a Black President of the US by 2008. On Voice of America broadcast in 1968,
Bobby Kennedy foresaw that a Black could be US president in forty years “…
there is no question about it. In the next forty years a Negro can achieve the
same position that my brother (President John F. Kennedy) had.”
In the white part of the Black Atlantic, Barack Obama may indeed attain the
highest pinnacle of political power ever reached by a man of colour in a
primarily white society. We already know that Pushkin did indeed successfully
rise to the pinnacle of cultural power in a society with a white majority. Was
this possible only in a Russia that had yet to evolve into a more racist
society? It was certainly a Russia that recognised supreme genius regardless of
race.
The writer is a professor of political science and African studies at State
University New York
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