Objectify This

There’s something fishy going on. Tonight, at dinner, through a mouthful of fried fish, my host brother Julio Cesar said that he was surprised that a Black man had gotten so far in elections in the United States. Julio tried to throw it off casually, but the remark perfectly captures what I think is one of those widely-held public sentiments: implied in what Julio said was the idea that Obama has already had his own species of victory here.

I keep hearing statements of this kind – reminders that this is a “historic candidacy” and that Obama is a first, a representative not just of the state of Illinois but also of black people everywhere.

What smelled fishy to me was not Julio’s food but the smugness with which he delivered this pronouncement: What does a Colombian kid care what color the President of the United States is? Colombia did not have a civil rights movement, and, to my mind, has suffered for it. To Colombians, the idea that their powerful northern neighbor would be run by a descendant of slaves is a rude challenge to the existing power structure.

I think that many Americans view Obama’s candidacy in this light, too, much to his benefit. Yet, if we were to attempt to construct a Foucaultian reading of the situation, I believe that we’d find something else altogether. In his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that the repression of sexuality actually helped construct an idea of sex as a powerful entity. Thus, when people speak openly about sexuality, they feel that they are performing a powerfully transgressive act, but they are actually acting in accordance with the systems of power that encoded that transgression. Yeah, whatever, you’re saying, but how does this have to do with Barack?

Well, an application of this “Rules are Made to be Broken” hypothesis would lead us to the conclusion that the repression of black people in the United States has strengthened the idea of black people as a powerful entity- an entity so scary and so powerful that they needed to be repressed in order to prevent them from taking over the world.

By Foucault’s argument, Obama’s candidacy does not challenge but reinforces preexisting power structures: although we’ve been taught that an opposition exists between The (white) Man who oppresses and The (multiethnic) People who are oppressed, in reality, The Man and The People are interdependent.

While it is true that in some very real senses, having Obama as a president will offer new evidence of social mobility in the United States, and reinforce the promise of the American Dream, is it not also worrisome that the Obama campaign is right now something more of a cult of personality instead of being based on any kind of platform or issues? Michelle Obama’s speech at the DNC was moving, yes, but she did not talk about issues.

In her column this week, Maureen Dowd wraps up with ” So that added to the weird mood at the convention, with some Democrats nitpicking Obama’s appearance, after Michelle’s knock-out speech and the fabulously cute girls. . . They wondered why he wasn’t wearing a tie, fearing he looked too young, and second-guessed Michelle’s green dress, wondering if it clashed with the blue stage, and fretted that there wasn’t a speaker Monday night attacking McCain and yelling about gas prices. “I’m telling you, man,” said one top Democrat, “it’s something about our party, the shtetl mentality.” ”

Frankly, that’s what I’m fretting about, too – that Obama has gotten so caught up in his cult of celebrity that he’s forgetting he has got to apply for a position outside of that village-sized cult– a position with the American people. The Bush Administration has handled things egregiously; there’s no question that this election should go to the Democrats. Yet where is the strong anti-Bush rhetoric? Does Obama, Man of Change, already mean Obama, Man of Democratic Party Line?