"It's in my DNA to unify all Americans,"
Barack Obama said repeatedly during the 2008
presidential campaign. I thought at the time this
was a pretty bold and audacious idea. It has
turned out to be a huge challenge for the
president who many have described as "the
conciliator-in-chief." According to many surveys,
the country still seems divided along ideological
lines - Democrats versus Republicans, Liberals
versus Conservatives, and Main Street versus Wall
Street.
He took office in the bicentennial
year of the birth of both Abraham Lincoln and
Charles Darwin. Many observers thought,at the
time, it was interesting America elected the first
African American
president,with a global and
international biography. Obama has been re-elected
on the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the
Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863), which
freed the slaves. Last week, on January 21, the
Mall in Washington DC was packed with Americans of
all backgrounds, colors and stripes.
We
all know that "race" is not a biological category
but a political and social one, especially, in a
nation of immigrants. We owe this insight to the
scientific work of biologists who are all
Darwinians now, and to the long march of civil
rights leaders who are all Lincoln's descendants.
Highlighting the remarkable confluence of
these two parallel lives, Malcolm Jones in
Newsweek noted that, "Lincoln and Darwin were both
revolutionaries, in the sense that both men
upended realities that prevailed when they were
born. They seem - and sound - modern to us,
because the world they left behind them is more or
less the one we still live in".
People
around the world know the definition of democracy
as a form of governance "of the people, for the
people and by the people", while they may not be
familiar with the Gettysburg Address, which
Lincoln thought "the world will little note".
Likewise many know the Darwinian theory of
evolution, and may know about the DNA or the
Genome. However, they may be bored by the complex
history of human origins, population genetics and
its applications to pharmaceuticals and modern
medicine.
Olivia Judson has revealed yet
another significant parallel between Lincoln and
Darwin, that is, they both disapproved of slavery.
Darwin "came from a family of ardent
abolitionists, and he was revolted by what he saw
in slave countries".
The idea that there
are hard-wired, "essential" differences between
populations will be further repudiated by the
Obama democrats. When human populations lived in
geographically isolated societies, race, language,
culture and borders were tightly nested. Rapid
travel, information revolution and globalization
obliterated these 20th century ideas and paved the
way for an American brand of multiculturalism.
President Obama said in his inaugural
speech, "We recall that what binds this nation
together is not the color of our skin or the
tenets of our faith or the origins of our names."
From Kunta Kinte to Django
Unchained Shortly after I arrived in
the US, as part of the first wave of immigrants
from India, Alex Haley's Roots had emerged
as a popular television serial. A new African
American name, Kunta Kinte, which later acquired
mythic stature in literature, was added to my
vocabulary. LeVar Burton, who played Kunta Kinte,
still appears on PBS programs now and then
teaching kids how to read and write. I can recall
the winter of 1977 when, as new immigrants, we
huddled together around the television to watch
the saga of an American slave family.
The
character of Django in Quentin Tarantino's recent
film Django Unchained completely subverts
the traditional slave narrative, where Haley's
chained Kunta Kinte appears anachronistic. Played
by Jamie Foxx, Django is the "one in ten thousand"
black bounty hunter in the Deep South, who must
collect his money for bringing in the White
outlaws - shooting them up and hauling their
bodies into the US Marshall's office - which has
rankled white and black moviegoers alike.
With the re-election of the first black
president, the traditional slave narrative had to
be turned upside down. It took a bold film
director like Tarantino, who is defending his
cinematic treatment of slavery as longtime coming.
Clearly, there is a strong correlation between the
rise of Obama and the appearance of a character
like Django in the American public consciousness,
who attempts to right the wrongs of America's
original sin in the style of a Spaghetti Western.
It is not for the faint hearted.
Spike Lee
has boycotted the film. "All I'm going to say is
that it's disrespectful to my ancestors to see
that film," Lee said. "I can't disrespect my
ancestors. That's just me. ... I'm not speaking on
behalf of anybody else."
Even though the
film has the grossed highest amount for a
Tarantino film, merchandising has taken a hit as
the Django toys and dolls have been pulled from
the stores. The African American community is
divided on the issue; the spat between Jamie Foxx
and Spike Lee has hit a new low.
"The
question for me is: where's Spike Lee coming
from?" Foxx said. "He didn't like Whoopi Goldberg,
he doesn't like Tyler Perry, he doesn't like
anybody, I think he's sort of run his course. I
mean, I respect Spike, he's a fantastic director.
But he gets a little shady when he's taking shots
at his colleagues without looking at the work. To
me, that's irresponsible."
From 'Father
Abraham' to King and Obama Django displays
over the top violence, whereas Lincoln, the
epic drama by Steven Spielberg, has very little
graphic violence. It is the other major
blockbuster film released to coincide with the
150th anniversary of the Emancipation
Proclamation. The film deals almost clinically
with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment,
which ended slavery and exacerbated the long
drawn-out American Civil War.
While
Lincoln deals with the political
high-culture, Django Unchained is about the
everyday culture of violence and slavery.
President Obama, who took the oath of
office on Martin Luther King's birthday, has a
deep "historical transference" with Abraham
Lincoln and Martin Luther King; it is now etched
in stone. He took the oath of office on two
Bibles, previously used by Martin Luther King and
Abraham Lincoln, with a million strong crowd
packed into the Mall in DC. In an essay, "What
I See in Lincoln's Eyes", Obama has described,
with an artist's flair for detail, how much
compassion he feels for the 16th president of the
United States. Obama's idealization of Lincoln
might be called a full-blown transference, in
purely psychoanalytic terms, or love in everyday
parlance, akin to Sigmund Freud's description of
his love for Michelangelo's Moses:
My favorite portrait of Lincoln
comes from the end of his life. In it, Lincoln's
face is as finely lined as a pressed flower. He
appears frail, almost broken; his eyes, averted
from the camera's lens, seem to contain a
heartbreaking melancholy, as if he sees before
him what the nation had so recently endured.
It would be a sorrowful picture except
for the fact that Lincoln's mouth is turned ever
so slightly into a smile. The smile doesn't
negate the sorrow. But it alters tragedy into
grace…
So when I, a black man with a
funny name, born in Hawaii of a father from
Kenya and a mother from Kansas, announced my
candidacy for the US Senate, it was hard to
imagine a less likely scenario than that I would
win - except, perhaps, for the one that allowed
a child born in the backwoods of Kentucky with
less than a year of formal education to end up
as Illinois' greatest citizen and our nation's
greatest President.
In Lincoln's rise
from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language
and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss
and remain determined in the face of repeated
defeat - in all this, he reminded me not just of
my own struggles. He also reminded me of a
larger, fundamental element of American life -
the enduring belief that we can constantly
remake ourselves to fit our larger
dreams.
In the inaugural speech last
week, Obama repeatedly invoked Lincoln and other
founding fathers:
We, the people, declare today that
the most evident of truths - that all of us are
created equal - is the star that guides us
still; just as it guided our forebears through
Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as
it guided all those men and women, sung and
unsung, who left footprints along this great
Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk
alone; to hear a King proclaim that our
individual freedom is inextricably bound to the
freedom of every soul on Earth.
James
Fallows of the Atlantic suggested that, "The
rhetorical and argumentative purpose of the speech
as a whole was to connect what Obama considers the
right next steps for America..."
James
Prothero, a religion scholar said, "Equality.
That's what today's inauguration was about. And we
have Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr to thank for it."
Republicans who
were rattled by Obama's liberal tone suggested the
president was too partisan - truly an
unreconstructed liberal - when he mentioned
"liberal touchstones, such as a strong role for
government, but it raised issues that could divide
GOP ranks, such as gay marriage, equal-pay
legislation, and even amnesty for illegal
immigrants." Daniel McCarthy of The American
Conservative said, Obama's second inaugural
sounded like "Little Lincoln, No Dostoyevsky."
In many important ways, as I have argued
in my book, Obama's political career has been
modeled after Lincoln's. Thus, what was at stake
in the re-election was not just another term in
office. It was everything Obama has stood for and
has tried to build as his political identity
starting out as a civil rights lawyer, state
senator and US senator from Illinois, and the
historic victory he achieved as the first African
American president.
America's race to
the future The theme of the inaugural was
"Faith in America's Future", or as the radio
broadcaster described it at the parade - "Our
People, Our Future" - who made us recite it out
loud before the president and First Lady walked
down the Pennsylvania Avenue. So what is the
future of race in the Obama world?
As
Craig Venter, the medical entrepreneur and
gene-hunter, has said, "We need medicine tailored
to your genome, not your race". In a
history-making event, when president Bill Clinton
on June 26, 2000, announced the completion of the
first survey of the book of life, he pointed to
the vast scientific landscape that has been opened
by these discoveries:
Today, we are learning the language
in which God created life. We are gaining ever
more awe for the complexity, the beauty, the
wonder of God's most divine and sacred gift.
With this profound new knowledge, humankind is
on the verge of gaining immense, new power to
heal. Genome science will have a real impact on
all our lives - and even more, on the lives of
our children. It will revolutionize the
diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if
not all, human diseases.
In coming
years, doctors increasingly will be able to cure
diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes
and cancer by attacking their genetic roots.
Just to offer one example, patients with some
forms of leukemia and breast cancer already are
being treated in clinical trials with
sophisticated new drugs that precisely target
the faulty genes and cancer cells, with little
or no risk to healthy cells. In fact, it is now
conceivable that our children's children will
know the term cancer only as a constellation of
stars.
Francis Fukuyama in Our
Posthuman Future has claimed that the new
forms of genomics and reproductive technologies
are steadily ushering in Huxley's brave new world,
in need of new social and cultural policies. Most
of us share 99% of the human genome. The remaining
1% accounts for individual variation in phenotypic
differences, such as, eye and skin color or
hard-wired pharmacoethnic outcomes, like the
clinical response to pharmaceutical drugs.
As a senator, Obama introduced The
Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act of 2006 to
advance medical research and innovation, something
he has pushed as a president. By passing the
healthcare law and setting aside funding for
genomics research, providing tax incentive,
modernizing the Food and Drug Administration and
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and
offering greater consumer protections, these set
of legislations will further revolutionize
medicine.
As a president, he removed the
ban on stem-cell research. Arthur Caplan, a
well-known bioethicist has commented that,
"Obama's decision to permit federal funding of
embryonic stem cell research is - finally - the
correct policy for the United States to follow. We
have the scientific expertise and infrastructure
to establish whether embryonic stem cell research
can deliver cures. And we have sufficient moral
consensus that it is the right thing to do."
As President Obama's re-election has
shown, it is the "natural genius" of the American
experiment that new-blooded Americans renew the
nation's promise in successive generations.
Standing on the shoulders of giants like Lincoln
and Darwin, the mounting evidence from genomics in
the coming decades, advanced by the greater
support from governmental and private funds, will
relegate the concept of "race" to a statistic and
a vestige of humanity's past.
(Adapted
from Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The
Making of a Global President" with the
permission of the publisher.)
Dinesh
Sharma is the author of Barack Obama in
Hawaii and Indonesia: The Making of a Global
President, which was rated among the Top 10
Black history books for 2012. His next book on
President Obama, Crossroads of Leadership:
Globalization and American Exceptionalism in the
Obama Presidency, is due to be published by
Routledge Press.
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