Unity

I’m not going to embed this video because it’s an official campaign product. But it reminded me of something I kept meaning to say during the primaries, to wit: When you listen to white people talk about Barack Obama, talk of “uniting the country” is almost universally taken to mean some kind of gesture toward bipartisanship or postpartisanship. Then then gets taken as either a good thing or a bad thing, according to your views on feisty partisanship, and either a ruse or a real commitment, according to your views on Obama.

But when I’ve heard Obama’s black supporters, the ones from the grassroots like the man in the video rather than the “official” black political leadership, it always sounds to me like they’re hearing a very different message. Uniting the country means, to them, something more like bringing African-Americans into the mainstream of American politics. An Obama presidency would be a stark contrast to the rhetoric of the “real” America — which is basically defined as the part where everyone is white — versus the unreal America comprised of non-whites and the white people who deign to live near them. Of course to some extent any Democratic Party electoral coalition represents a rebuke to that way of thinking. But someone like a Bill Clinton represented a very self-conscious effort to portray himself as a member of the “real” America. Obama, by contrast, is a multi-racial guy from a big city who has no real choice but to stand his ground and say, no, the America that I live in is the real America.

Of course this element of Obamaism appeals to white yuppies, too. But I think Obama’s educated, urbane, cosmopolitan fans have always been able to savor the real/unreal distinction with a certain amount of irony and non-chalance. But for those written out of the “real” America for reasons of race rather than taste in salad greens, that kind of cultural and political marginalization is much more threatening, and the idea of relaxing it is incredibly appealing.