I'd like to quote a passage from an essay by Breyten Breytenbach, that he wrote about a visit to Senegal. It appeared in the March Harper's Readings (subscription link.)
After that I will muse a little and ask a question.
As I approach the last paragraphs of this essay, I’m driving through the dark streets of Dakar after arriving at the chaotic airport on a flight from Paris. Ka’afir, the Senegalese colleague who comes to fetch me, and I do a quick roundup of world news since we last met. He brings me up to speed on the latest disappointments caused by the corrupt and inept Wade government: civil-servant salaries not paid in two months, power outages lasting days in the poorer neighborhoods, schools on strike, the impossible dearness of basic food, the Lions (Senegal’s national football team) not making the cut for the Africa Cup . . .
We pause to reflect on all of this. Then he suddenly says, "But the American people gave a lesson in democracy to the whole world."
How so, I ask?
"Obama."
He says nobody in Africa believed that the Americans could find in their hearts the maturity and the fairness to elect a black man to the highest office. I warn that the proof is still to come, that the man may fail because the challenges are too overwhelming, because the people around him have too powerfully entrenched views and strategies different from his (I mention the Israel conundrum).
"Even so," Ka’afir says, "even if he fails, which is likely, the historic fact still remains that the American people grew beyond their fears and prejudices. Their hearts expanded."
I don't think we understand, consistently, what the election of Barack Obama meant and means. During the campaign he said it was about us, not about him. So it was then and so it is now.
But we did not elect President Obama so that he could be a static symbol of what Ka'afir, in the essay above, called our lesson to the world in democracy. Or if we did, then we are no lesson to Ka'afir, to the world, or to ourselves. Taking Obama himself to be the point of what we did in 2008 is to do nothing more than put him on a pedestal: a forlorn monument to our once-expanded hearts.
The question I wanted to ask: did we, and do we still, deserve this praise?