The Proof of the Pudding

is in the eating, or so I'm told. It's another one of those old English proverbs that just make me want to laugh but it does capture my own hopes and trepidations over the election of Obama. I'm a political junkie: I freely admit to watching the inauguration today and being moved by the great masses of people who've come out to mark this day in American history. And as moving as I found it, I doubt that anyone who is not American can understand the depth of feeling this particular election and inauguration has engendered for Americans. I think of it as a singular event and a most welcome one because whatever else it may mean, it means the end of the Bushes and the era of fear, terror and sheer stupidity. Today is encapsulated for me by a number of signs that various TV cameras panned in on: "Dream Come True"; "Cowboys against War"; "Free Palestine"; "Black + White = United at Last"; and "The World is Watching".
Even with only a rudimentary understanding of race in America, I'm as astonished by this election as are those who have lived under the yoke of the peculiarly American binary of black and white. The week I spent in Philadelphia a couple of years ago is seared into my memory. The divide between black and white, and where they live, how they travel, what they eat... all of these seemed to me to be almost caricatured in their exaggeratedness. But it's not a caricature at all: the racialization of poverty in the US is something that underlies so many other racialized distinctions between Americans. If you are poor and black (or Latino), you are likely to live in a dump, in a dangerous neighbourhood, take public transit and eat badly. Read Mike Marqusee's article on race in America here. That on top of the historical injustices may go some way to explaining the mood of the country on this day.
I hope some at least of the hopes that Obama is now carrying come to pass. For me, it's all about how he will change America's arrogant behaviour toward the outside world. He said all the right things today but we will simply have to wait and see. Perhaps most immediately, we who are not American are watching to see what he will do about Guantanamo and the Israel-Palestine crisis. I thought I saw the slightest of winces when Bono (who hasn't met a lost cause he won't take up) worked in a very deliberate reference to the "Palestinian dream" during his performance. But that could just have been indigestion from all the adulation in the air. We shall have to wait and see if Obama is anything more than symbolism.
That said, the symbolism is potent indeed. To watch a black man walk into the presidential house built by slave labour, watched by a million people standing in what was once Washington's Slave Market, referencing Lincoln in his speeches (and surely aware that Lincoln, who Americans like to think of as the Great Emancipator gave two inaugural addresses, one defending slavery that now is not brought up in polite company, and another where he broke with it)... well, this is the kind of symbolism that keeps cultural critics like me employed on cold January evenings.