Slaves—men of West African origin branded with Christian monikers like Tom, Peter, Ben, Harry, and Daniel—helped build the White House. Three were on loan from its chief architect, James Hoban. Construction began in 1792, and slaves worked as sawyers, quarrymen, carpenters, stonemasons, brickmakers. Such was the fabric of the new republic: twelve American Presidents owned slaves, eight of them while in office.
After emancipation and the Civil War, a handful of black men won seats in Congress, but, as the spirit of Jim Crow overwhelmed the promise of Reconstruction, white supremacy regained its hold. On January 29, 1901, the last of those black congressmen, George H. White, of North Carolina, stood in the well of the House and prophesied the miracle of reconciliation and justice:
This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the Negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress but let me say Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are on behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people. . . . The only apology I have for the earnestness with which I have spoken is that I am pleading for the life, the liberty, the future happiness, and manhood suffrage for one-eighth of the entire population of the United States.
On January 20th, an African-American family will take occupancy of the White House. The incoming President’s father was Kenyan, his mother a Kansan. The future First Lady’s great-great-grandfather Jim Robinson worked as a slave on the Friendfield Plantation, in Georgetown, South Carolina, and is thought to be buried there in an unmarked grave. The election of Barack Hussein Obama represents the culmination of the processes predicted by Representative White, forces that accelerated with the rise, in 1955, of the Second Reconstruction––the civil-rights movement––and the election and the appointment thereafter of hundreds of African-Americans to public office. It is cause not for self-congratulation but for celebration nonetheless. There are many things that the Inauguration of Barack Obama will not mean—the complete eradication of racial prejudice; the disappearance of injustices of history still made manifest in the everyday statistics of employment, education, and incarceration––but it can only instill in the American people a sense of possibility and progress.
Barack Obama was not elected the forty-fourth President based on the depth of his legislative achievements or on the length of his public service. John McCain and Hillary Clinton were the “experience” candidates. Rather, Obama projected an inspiring message, a “narrative,” of change at a moment when so much in American life––the economy, the environment, national security, health care––is in such parlous condition that, for many voters, political familiarity seemed less a source of solace than a form of despair. During the campaign, Obama embodied novelty and a broader American coalition, and everything we heard about his temperament—as a community organizer in Chicago, as a president of the Harvard Law Review, as a legislator, as a campaigner—spoke of someone who, in contrast to the outgoing, faith-based President, possessed a gift for rational judgment and principled compromise.
Now there remains only the occasion of Obama’s Inaugural Address before he will put to the test his capacity to reconcile forces and historical actors far beyond his experiences in Cambridge, Hyde Park, Capitol Hill, and Oahu. As if the hydra-headed economic disaster and the heightened tension between nuclear Pakistan and nuclear India were not enough to quicken the pulse, the Bush era is ending, and the Obama era is opening, with yet another conflagration in the most intractable, faith-dazed, and history-inflamed spot on earth. With the end of an uneasy six-month truce, the agents of Hamas immediately began firing rockets, dozens of them a day, into the population centers of southern Israel. As the Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab writes in the Washington Post, the Hamas leadership had lost much of its support in Gaza and knew that the only way to regain it was to reëstablish itself as “the heroic resister.” In return, the Israeli government––now in the run-up to a national election––unleashed its F-16s and helicopter gunships. As in so many instances in the past half century—the Lebanon War of 1982, the “Iron Fist” response to the 1988 intifada, the Lebanon War of 2006—the Israelis have reacted to intolerable acts of terror with a determination to inflict terrible pain, to teach the enemy a lesson. The civilian suffering and deaths are inevitable; the lessons less so.
On June 4th, the day after Obama clinched enough delegates to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, he spoke at a session of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, with the intention of assuring American Jews of his allegiances. Once more, he invoked his own story and told of how, when he was eleven, he first learned about Jewish traditions, history, and the “dreams of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds”:
The story made a powerful impression on me. I had grown up without a sense of roots. My father was black; he was from Kenya, he had left when I was two. My mother was white and she was from Kansas, and I’d moved with her to Indonesia and then back to Hawaii. In many ways, I didn’t know where I came from. So I was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual, emotional, and cultural identity. And I understood the Zionist idea—that there is always a homeland at the center of our story.
As President, Obama will have to address another dream of homeland––the unrealized dream of the Palestinians. In the West Bank, he will be dealing with a leadership that, while imperfect, supports the overdue justice of a two-state resolution. The same is true in Israel, at least with those politicians to the left of Benjamin Netanyahu. But in Gaza Obama will be dealing, directly or not, with political actors who, with Iranian support, seek ceaseless battle with Israel, and may even hope to destabilize Egypt.
Soon after George W. Bush came to office, eight years ago, he told a confidant that “there’s no Nobel Peace Prize to be had” in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. He turned his attention instead to places farther east in the Middle East, with mostly horrific results. But, as Obama told his listeners at AIPAC last June, there remains the Talmudic imperative of tikkun olam, “the obligation to repair the world.” In four years, or eight, he may well have won no Nobel medal, made no final repair. But the obligation of constant engagement is deep; the cost of negligence is paid in blood. And, what is more, history has proved that the seemingly impossible can be achieved: the Irish and the English have all but resolved a conflict that began in the days of Oliver Cromwell, and on January 20th an African-American President will cross the color line and move into the White House––a house that slaves helped build. ♦
