He’s African-American, but his African diaspora experience derives from the travels of a modern African — his Kenyan father, searching for educational opportunity and marrying an American — not from the slave ships and century of segregation and oppression that preceded the Civil Rights movement.
Upon Obama’s election as president, his relatives in Kogelo, a village of mud huts, celebrated with a 1,000-person bash and Kenya’s government declared a national holiday.
Obama was born on US soil, of course, but some of his early formative years were lived in Indonesia, not long after the world’s most populous majority-Muslim nation was liberated from Dutch colonial rule.
This biography was so unusual for an American national leader that Obama’s Democratic and Republican opponents called into question his “American-ness.” Hillary Clinton’s pollster, Marc Penn, argued that Obama’s “roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values… Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t.” Republicans, meanwhile, tried to focus voters on Obama’s “foreignness,” falsely linking him to terrorism.
Obama is not American in the way of the white men who have preceded him in the White House—neither in biography nor sensibility. Only a few of the early presidents had parents born in Europe, although for most the culture, commerce, and power of England were a constant frame of reference. Teddy Roosevelt worried that waves of European immigrants might dilute the essence of American-ness. And George W. Bush was unapologetically ignorant of the rest of the world.
Yet, more and more Americans are transnationals—people who live their lives and whose awareness and feelings are rooted less exclusively in the American setting. They live, work and socialize in multiple lands and globally. This trend and its implications are well documented by Alvaro Lima, a Brazilian economist who works for the mayor of Boston, in an article, “Living Here and There: How Immigrants Are Creating Transnational Social Spaces that Transform Communities and Nations”. Lima’s focus is on the many transnational immigrants now living in America, especially the millions of Latinos and Asian-Americans who have arrived in the last 10 years and are reshaping the “diversity” within which Americans live. (The Hispanic vote, which exceeded the 2004 election by some 2 million voters, went about 2:1 for Obama.)
But a growing number of transnationals are also American-born, like Obama, who connect in new ways to the world outside the nation’s borders. This too was reflected in the election’s results. The “youth vote” also grew by about 2 million and also went 2:1 for Obama.
Keep an eye on those youth. “Millenials think globally,” report Morley Winograd and Michael Hais in Millenial Makeover (2008), a book about the politics of the Millenial generation that cites data from a Harvard University study. “Having grown up on the Internet, they are more connected to the world than any generation in our nation’s history.” A large majority of Millenials have traveled abroad. “They are positive about globalization’s impact on the culture and educational system of the United States… [They] are interested in a multilateral, reasoned approach in dealing with the nation’s enemies. [They] believe it is important for the United States to be respected in the world, and most feel that goal can be best achieved through moral leadership, not military force.”
Voters certainly judged that Barack Obama’s values and roots are decidedly American. But the nation’s changing demographics and culture, and perhaps its changing politics—as well as the unprecedented blood lines and experiences of its new president—suggest that an American experience and identity is emerging that includes, but also transcends, what being an “American” has meant.
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