Friday, June 06, 2008 Editorials: Black American president?
WITH his confirmation as his party’s presidential nominee, Democratic senator from Illinois Barack Obama is only a step away from becoming the first colored American to become US president.
For Americans, this marks a great step towards erasing “racial prejudice” in US history.
To the world, it signifies that the Americans may have matured socially and politically.
There was a time in its early history that the US had to compromise with its principle over the right of suffrage to its colored citizens.
After the civil war in 1865 when the American North freed its black slaves, there arose a political contradiction in US democracy: blacks were not extended the right to vote as equals with the whites.
Eventually, a compromise was reached: blacks were allowed to vote, but only one of every three was registered.
It meant that only one-third of a black person was considered citizen.
Full recognition of citizenship was granted very much later.
Surprise
Obama’s feat is thus a “milestone for a nation where just decades ago, racial discrimination was widespread and many African-American had to fight …to vote.”
Today, there are areas in the so-called Deep South where racial prejudice against skin color still prevails.
But Obama’s ascendancy reversed America’s global image as a democracy stained with racial prejudice.
The first term Illinois senator took many American political observers by surprise.
In just a few months, he changed the way Americans looked at him.
Feat
“In securing the delegates needed to lock up the nomination, Obama completed one of the most remarkable US political campaigns in memory. A first term senator, unknown nationally four years ago, (he) toppled one of America’s most powerful political families.”
As a result of his feat, the Democrats now stand a good chance of getting into the White House come November.
What appears more remarkable is that while it took 17 months for the American Democrats to decide which to nominate, a first woman or the first black to the US presidency, they chose somebody whose race not very long ago was not even extend the right of suffrage as “whole” individual, but only as a third of a human being.
