The Obama Effect

On the 100th day of the Obama presidency, CBS News release a poll sampling how people felt about race relations in the Obama era, which can be found here. Across the board, race relations have improved, and, though, people of color are still behind whites in almost every major statistical category from homeownership to graduation rates, everyone generally thinks the situation has improved. For me, this provokes profound questions.

Understandably, Obama's election was historic, but couldn't race relations have been improved without the election of a president? The material conditions are the same, but the social walls seem to be crumbling. Why is it, that after electing a black president, that both whites and blacks suddenly feel able to communicate with each other?

In American culture, the President is us, he (as they have always been) is the king, the representative, the symbol. Collectively, we live vicariously through the head of state, and when we feel like he is not us, we scream, yell, bitch, and moan that he is evil, fascist, communist, Hitler and Stalin. We do this because the king's body is literally a microcosm of the collective body, and we spend our time screaming about the king, when in fact, our loyalty to said king matters little, much like the loyalty of peasants to their kings and queens. We live in a democratically elected monarchy in which the worship of the king dictates much, too much, of our everyday lived experience.

I'm thrilled at recent developments, but they never required Presidential Approval, they only required abandoning the fear of the other and being-in-common with neighbors, friends, and co-workers. We live through electronic media, we live through what we see on TV and the New York Times, but we don't live in community, even now, and there can be no president elected who will teach us this - in fact, it is antithesis. The racial walls are crumbling, socially, now we must build the community bonds to keep them from being re-erected.