[Reader-list] Congratulations America

[gautam bhan]

Dear All,

 I dont usually post on the list, but thought I'd share a piece I
wrote for elsewhere.

- gautam

Cross-posted from Kafila.org

A Letter from America

I was out all night in Oakland, California, last night. One of the
most "dangerous" cities in the country, crime statistics say. Usually,
that's always code for historic black neighborhoods. This one is no
different. Close to us are some of the districts and towns worst hit
by the foreclosure crisis: one in three homes in parts of California
are now owned by banks and not people. A generation of voters in this
district remember what it was like not being able to vote because they
were black. This is part of the America that has elected Obama.

My students are predominantly white. This is Berkeley, California,
with some of the most progressive affirmative action [what in India we
call reservation] policies, and so many, many of them are also Asian
American and Latino. There are still preciously few African America
students at the college level, even at subsidized public universities.
My students are mostly about twenty. They have the freedom not to
remember Reagan and Thatcher. They use the word "past" rarely and look
only in one direction. They are a generation long described as the
apathetic children of technology. They are an America that has not
easily inherited the arrogance that so easily slips in with power.
This is another part of America that has elected Obama.

I saw the election results come in with community organisers,
activists, people who work in everyday America. Their tears are tears
I recognize from the defeat of the Hindutva and India Shining. They
are tears of relief and of belief. Tears that remind you that the
slow, thankless, everyday work of social change has a horizon that is
bigger than our individual lives. This is another part of America that
has elected Obama.


There was a different America on the streets last night - in ten years
of going in and out of this country, I have never seen it like this.
Cars were honking, people walking the streets openly crying and
celebrating with strangers, spontaneous gatherings of people at every
corner, public buses lit up, hope and joy were in abundance. America
doesn't do public displays of politics or affection - it doesn't rush
out on streets for much other than sports. It hasn't, in any case, for
a very long time. Jesse Jackson, one of the most famous black
Americans other than Martin Luther King, openly crying amidst millions
in Grant Park in Chicago is a sight I wont lightly forget.

Not everything will change with Obama, but change they will. Race will
not disappear, but it will never be the same again. Structural
inclusion and inequality might not vanish tomorrow, but its pipes and
planks will be made visible. America might not change all that angers
much of the world towards it, but it will not be able to so easily be
so naked in its power. To think of Obama is not to judge whether this
hope will turn out to be real or false — the point is that it is hope
at all. This hope, even if all its promises fail after a time, will
have unintended consequences. Unintended consequences that, in stories
of the everyday, are in the end what help people change their lives.
Leaders come and go, but it is the unintended consequences of hope
that leave lasting, if infinitesimal, change.

After eight years of Bush, Sept 11, a financial crisis, two divisive
wars, deepening poverty, and horrid clashes on moral values, this
landslide victory is the story of a scarred, hurt, and scared nation,
shaken from its arrogance by a series of blows, trying to slowly look
inside and heal itself. No matter what we think of America, its
imperialism, its role in global successes and tragedies alike, that is
a process all of us, in every country who have ever tried to think of
change can understand and support.