Obama's strandedness

I was not going to write on the Reverend Wright controversy anymore, but I simply cannot resist the urge to speak out in defense of Obama whose remarkably honest press conference yesterday laid bare the intricate and extremely exhausting process of navigating between the so-called black and white worlds. The fact that his strandedness between these worlds sends many white Americans, including most of the "pundits," into a panic mode shows the yawning gap between these worlds 146 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and 44 years after the ratification of the Civil Rights Act. The massive call to Obama to speak to the two worlds in different voices has been the most depressing development of this campaign. On the one hand, it is demanded that he explain to the white world the fiery and what many pundits have disturbingly called "wild" behavior of his pastor. I cannot pretend to "understand" the "African American church," but I have had the pleasure of attending several black churches while I was a member of the choir in my undergraduate college. These visits, coupled with the scattered things I have read about the African American experience, were enough to acquaint me with some of the basics of these services so when I saw the clip of the Reverend Wright I was not "shocked at his wildness" as many of the white pundits have continually reminded their viewers. Their reaction and the adjectives (such as "wild") they use to describe the Reverend have been deeply disturbing because they echo the racist portrayal of the "savage black man." To the extent that the criticisms of the Reverend have focused on the actual manner in which he delivers his sermons, I can agree with him that these criticisms have been directed at the church and not himself. On the other hand, the Reverend's performance at the Press Club shows an appalling lack of understanding for the trouble he has caused to the Obama campaign which in turn, shows his unwillingness to understand the way the white voters respond to his sermons. As a result, Obama is thrust in the middle of this gap and forced to shout to each side but in a different cultural language since the two sides cannot hear each other. As a racially "mixed" man in a country where race pervades many aspects of life, Obama has struggled with the role of a cultural translator his whole life, as he describes in Dreams from My Father: "As it was, I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere" (82). Yesterday's press conference showed an exhausted Obama, still being forced into this role and still trying to believe that the worlds would indeed cohere.

The incessant call for Obama to explain the actions and words of another African-American, while white Americans are rarely (if never) called to speak for the actions of other whites, shows the prevailing mode of thinking that groups all African-Americans, or anyone associated with that world, into one camp. This morning's Times' editorial makes the very same point: "It is an injustice, a legacy of the racist threads of this nation’s history, that prominent African-Americans are regularly called upon to explain or repudiate what other black Americans have to say, while white public figures are rarely, if ever, handed that burden." (McCain has never had to distance himself from the bigoted Pastor John Hagee). Similarly to the nationalist thinking that pervades my own home-country, racist thinking reduces individuals to their racial category. In talking about the struggle of many "mixed" individuals to navigate these different worlds, Obama writes: "The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals" (100).

Obama's campaign is a call to all of us to stand with him in the gap and try to persuade the people from both sides to jump into the middle and stand with him. It remains to be seen if he will succeed, but he sure looked lonely at that podium yesterday!

Generational envy

Would anyone with enough clout and authority tell Reverend Jeremiah Wright to shut up! He gave another speech in which he emphasized differences between the black and white worlds completely ignoring the continuing damage he is doing to Senator Obama. I understand that the Reverend has every right to speak out on the very real issues of racial justice and the continuing inequality and racism that pervades the American society, but can he think strategically and not flame further controversies that the race-insensitive right (and Clinton) will exploit to damage Obama? Of course, he can. But he doesn't want to, because the Reverend, like many other Reverends (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Billy Graham, etc) are so used to being the supposed spokesmen for their causes that they cannot handle the spotlight shining on someone like Obama, even if it is for the moment. Let's remember the lukewarm support Jesse Jackson expressed for the Obama candidacy when it looked like he had no chance of winning, but he quickly corrected himself and jumped on the Obama bandwagon, but still without much enthusiasm.

Reverend Wright fully understands the potential remarkable change that Obama's presidency could bring to the country, and its racial relations, but he doesn't seem to care. I think that generational envy a lot of these leaders feel towards Obama's appeal across generations and races plays a large part in their utter indifference to him.

Obama's candidacy: A test of American imagination

I have to admit that Obama's loss in Pennsylvania by 10 points to Hillary Clinton has really worried me. It would still take math worthy of a zen master for Hillary to beat him to the nomination (unless the DNC takes it away from him at the end of the primary season, causing a civil war within the Democratic Party), the polls from Pennsylvania are extremely concerning. His apparent lack of appeal among blue collar white workers is striking in that the polls show that 10% of Democrats would stay away from the polls if Obama is the nominee and 15% said they would vote for McCain. If the election in November is as tight as it seems it might be, and 25% of the core of the Democratic constituency fails Obama in Pennsylvania without him picking up any traditional Republican states (and this also is an open question) he will lose. What is surprising that many of these voters told pollsters that race was an issue for them! This honesty is shocking (and revealing) considering that in many public polls people are likely to hide their race attitudes. Then consider how many voters are not being candid so add several more percentage points to the number of voters Obama might not get just because the color of his skin. And this brings me to my point.

Obama's candidacy speaks more about America than it does about Obama. Here is a man whose multicultural upbringing, his brilliant speaking skills, and his honesty are promising to usher America into a new era of race relations. Here is a man who, being outside of the civil rights generation as well as from a mixed racial/cultural background, can really inspire and unite. And yet, there are many people out there who will never vote for him, not because they disagree with his policies, not because they seem him as elitist (polls show no movement away from Obama after his "bitter" remarks), but simply because they see him as a "black man." While watching those results come in early Wednesday morning, I thought of Obama as a young boy going through that magazine in an embassy office in Indonesia and being aghast at a picture of a formerly black man who had paid for chemical treatment just to pass as a white man: "He must be terribly sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino--I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn't it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money...There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person...I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted." (Dreams from My Father, p. 30). I wonder if he remembers that moment every time pundits on CNN remind us (and Wolf Blitzer never tires of repeating!) that "he has a big problem with white voters."

I am still optimistic in that I think that the racial problem is a bit overblown. Many of these blue collar workers are not voting against Obama but for Clinton. My parents are very nostalgic for Clinton years (despite of this, both of them are Obama supporters) when they had 15 hours of overtime every week at their factory. And they compare that with the barely 40 hours they get now, the freezing of their wage, layoffs that are becoming commonplace, and the shrinking number of sick days they can take. I think that many workers in Pennsylvania voted with Clinton nostalgia on their mind. Secondly, the poll numbers showing they will not vote for Obama might also echo the hostile and polarized atmosphere of the exhausting Obama-Clinton fight and might just be a temporary annoyance. In other words, once the party coalesces around him, voters will follow come November.

But then again, this is an extremely optimistic view of America, a country that is so hard to describe through sound-bites. America is tolerant, it is bigoted, it is open minded as well as narrow-minded, it is culturally diverse and homogenous, it is kind, but also unbearably cruel. Obama brilliantly captures the multi-facetedness and ambivalence of American identity which characterized the men of his maternal grandfather's generation: "His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence..." (p.16)

I think the resonance of Obama among these white voters will show which America prevails on that November day. Talking about his struggle with his racial identity in college, Obama writes of the overwhelming force of racist thinking, which often made him feel as if he had to choose between his white and black grandmothers: "Only a lack of imagination, a failure of nerve, had made me think that I had to choose between them. They all asked the same thing of me, these grandmothers of mine. My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't, end there." (p.111) Will America show its own burst of imagination this November? I have to believe that it will.

"We are not your lab rats"

This is how a man in his mid 50ies greeted me as I walked into his Sarajevo apartment to interview him and his wife for "my dissertation on mixed marriages in Bosnia." His blunt greeting of welcome prefaced his long diatribe against those who would label him and his wife as "mixed" all with the purpose of intruding, along with their politics, into the private confines of their bedroom. "We are normal, so I don't understand why people have to come in and observe us as if we are some strange, exotic breed" he said as he tried to explain why he was reluctant to agree to the interview. However, he gave in after their good family friend Svetlana Broz, the granddaugther of Tito, told them about my project and asked them to help me and serve as my informants. "We have a great respect for Svetlana," his wonderful and brilliantly intelligent (but humbly quiet) wife said. I tried to explain that the purpose of my dissertation was not to single them out as "unique" or exotic or use them as lab rats, but rather to complicate the very idea of mixedness that has dominated our discourse and marginalized all non-ethnic or multi-ethnic alternatives. However, as I struggled to explain myself, I was voicing my own concerns over the very core of my project.

I have agonized for months over using "mixed marriage" as the main category of analysis, which drives my archival and oral research. I have felt as if just by singling out the people who are in a mixed marriage, according to the official discourse, I am homogenizing these individuals into neat categories that I am supposedly de-constructing. In other words, I feel like I am buying into the narratives of the three nationalisms that dominate every aspect of life in this country. But then again, this is the methodological agony many historians of nationalism face as they try to explain the apparent success of nationalism in grouping people in accordance with what it proclaims are centuries-old, immutable categories.

Nevertheless, my sources--archival and oral--have proven to be great allies in resisting the overwhelming logic of nationalism. The Islamic court documents from the interwar period (the 1930s in particular) reveal voices of ordinary people throughout Bosnia, many of them illiterate peasants speaking through their lawyers or clerks, trying to navigate their everyday lives through many categories of belonging that officials (religious officials in this case) persistently tried to impose on them. Over and over again, what comes out in these documents is not some ideological or religious fanaticism of the peasant, but his unwavering pragmatism. In one letter a peasant from a remote Bosnian village sends a short, but blunt message to the Sharia judges: "Leave me alone or I will convert to Christianity. Or you may even force me to go on a hunger strike." I have not been able to trace the letter or an incident to which the peasant was responding, but I found it among the cases of Muslims getting married in churches, or going to Christian ceremonies. Local religious leaders implored the High Sharia Court to do something about these "incidents." I assume the irritated peasant was responding to the intrusive attempts of the local imam to regulate his everyday life.

In interviews, my informants express the frustration that is similar to the one expressed by the nameless peasant from the 1930s. They sigh, cry, laugh, or even shout at being called mixed, and being forced to declare themselves as either Serb, Bosnjak, or Croat. They plead for a different category (most often, "Bosanac" which denotes regional rather than national belonging). And inevitably, these frustrations preface their stories from the war, each of the stories remarkably fascinating and unique, but each of them sharing the common thread: the confusion of individuals about their national belonging at the beginning of the war. An explicit example of this happened in the early days of the war in Sarajevo's neighborhood of Grbavica, which was taken over by the Serb forces early in the war and stayed under their control until the end. N. was a Muslim and his wife B. was a Serb. They wanted to stay put in the neighborhood-despite the raids of Serbian forces of Muslim apartments--because they wanted to reach Belgrade where their son had gone just before the war broke out. As they were taken out of their building by a Serb paramilitary unit, the woman ("Serb") said that she doesn't want to stay there anymore, but wans to leave, at which her husband ("Muslim") said: "No,I want to stay." They went back and forth while the confused Serb paramilitary thug watched them. "He looked like he was watching a ping-pong match" B. said to me. Then he shouted at them. "Stop, both of you. I am confused. Who is the Muslim and who is the Serb here?" Confused that the Muslim man wanted to stay and his Serb wife wanted to leave the Serbian neighborhood, the confused Serbian soldier echoed the intrusiveness of the nationalist logic, which claims the right to define the most intimate feelings of individuals on the basis of their supposed nationality. The couple told me their story laughing at the absurdity of the situation.

It is these kinds of stories that give me hope that I may have been right to stick to "mixed marriage" as my category of analysis. The mere mention of my topic provokes smiles, laughs, tsk-tsk sounds (accompanied by the shaking of the head) and almost always provokes long monologues that are often memory trips to the nooks and crannies of people's past that I might not be able to reach any other way but through these interviews. Thus, despite his "we are not your lab rats" greeting, N. and his wife talked for more than three hours that night. As I was leaving, they said they were very happy to be of help and that I should stay in touch. When my research or lack of productivity gets me down, it is these stories that motivate me to keep on going.

Defending Obama's "bitter" remarks

The recent so-called controversy over Obama's "bitter comments" has revealed a troubling and ever persistent prejudice in the American society: a knee-jerk despise of anything that resembles critical thinking. What is most disappointing is not that the furor over the remarks was voiced by some supposed common man or woman (whoever they are), but by their self-proclaimed muse Hillary Clinton whose poetic memory trips to her duck-hunting childhood echo the adventures of the all-American Annie Oakley herself. After using the word muse to describe Hillary's proselytizing efforts on behalf of our common man/woman I realized that I had committed an act of verbal violence since one of the definitions of "muse" in the Oxford English dictionary describes it as a "spell of thoughtfulness and reflection" and Hillary's latest spell was the exact opposite: a breathtakingly cynical embrace of limitless stupidity.

During the now infamous San Francisco fund-raiser Obama attempted to explain the seeming lack of his appeal among some rural and small town white voters in Pennsylvania (the lack of his appeal, in my view, has been grossly exaggerated) by arguing that it is the economic hardship that has caused many people to "cling" to guns, their faith, their mistrust of the outsiders, and to everything familiar, in struggling to anchor themselves in the increasingly unfamiliar globalized world. Obama has absolutely no reason to apologize for his thoughtful remarks since they highlighted a historical trend, which Marx insightfully described: material conditions influence the way people think of their place in the world. While it could be objected that Marxist thought overly emphasized material (economic) conditions at the expense of other factors, even a cursory gaze at the situation around the world gives credence to his argument: a precipitous economic depression in the 1980s Yugoslavia led many to embrace jingoistic nationalism as a protective cushion; the millions of Gaza's men, unable to feed their families, turn to Hamas in buttressing their self-worth; and millions of lower class white Americans blame affirmative action (and by extension, African-Americans) for their economic ills. While Obama could have been clearer in arguing that his statement over-generalizes and homogenizes a population, the core of his argument is true. However, the hysterical (and excuse the gender marked tone of this adjective) response to his remarks masks the underlying sociological trend within the American ruling elite: unwillingness for self-criticism. Put more simply, intellectual laziness.

The core of Hillary's attack on Obama has been that he has somehow mocked the very values that make up the American genes. This kind of essentialist thinking prevents any attempt to understand why people behave the way they do. On the contrary, "our values argument" says that "everything that we as Americans do is inherently good simply because we are Americans." With this argument she has found an unlikely ally in George Will. In his Washington Post editorial this morning, Will claims that in his remarks Obama has echoed the very essence of modern liberalism, which "has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them." This statement says more about George Will than it does about liberalism since it reveals that him, and not Obama, is the one who equates anti-immigrant sentiment, love of guns and religion, to American identity. While Obama's argument was anational and regional--in that he was commenting on small towns rather than the abstract notion of America--George Will and Hillary Clinton's attack uses the bully pulpit of uncritical nationalism to mask the underlying unwillingness to bare open and question the supposedly constitutive elements of American nationalism.

It is the American elite--a club where Hillary Clinton along with her $109 million fortune has a prominent place--that uses the charge of "elitism" to excuse their own intellectual laziness and political cowardice. This is the most condescending and shameless tactic of all.

Srebrenica: banality of memory

It would not stop raining as our rent-a-car hesitantly made its way through the windy roads of eastern Bosnia on our way to Srebrenica. The fog that descended threateningly from Bosnia's steep and gorgeous mountains--and followed us throughout our four-hour ride-- added to the melancholy that had overtaken me even before we left Sarajevo. I felt as if we were participating in the grisly enterprise of "genocide tourism," craving to touch, smell, and gaze at the place where over 8,000 Muslim men and young boys were summarily executed in just four days, take our snapshots, and be on our way, content that we could boast to our friends back home that we had been to Srebrenica. Melancholy soon gave way to fear as we stopped at the first gas station in Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb entity) to ask for "directions to Srebrenica." I felt as if the very utterance of the word would disrobe me of anonymity, exposing my deepest thoughts in front of a glaring stare of a stranger, enabling him to reduce me to an ethnic category in a matter of seconds. I was surprised by the politeness of the gas attendant who gave us detailed directions on how to get to Srebrenica and even wished us a good trip as we pulled out of the station. "Maybe he is a Muslim," I thought to myself, immediately regretting it, realizing once again that I was not as immune to nationalist logic as I often boast. On our way we got lost several more times and stopped to ask directions at a police stop, a hotel, and a restaurant. At each stop, the politeness of the strangers and what it seemed like their genuine desire to make sure we find our way, exposed not the chauvinistic and nationalistic thinking of the "Serbs," but my very own prejudices. Srebrenica, even before we even reached it, was teaching me something about myself.

The landscape was littered with houses with unfinished second floors, their owners probably having had to stop rebuilding due to the so-called donor fatigue in Bosnia. The cemeteries reflected the prewar ethnic composition of this region: a Serb cemetery would be followed by a Muslim one, to be followed by a Serb one, and so on. Every so-often a newly rebuilt mosque would surprise me, but "for sale" signs on the houses reminded me that these are just artificial symbols of a supposedly renewed multiethnic coexistence: most Muslims were gone, and they were not coming back. The newly (re)built Orthodox churches, with Serbian flags waving on top of them, campaign posters advertising Bosnian Serb political parties, and the exclusive use of cyrillic on all signs were unequivocal reminders that this was Serbian land.

The lonely, but enermous, Bosnian flag reminded me that we had arrived at the Memorial Center in Potocari, a small village on the outskirts of Srebrenica. Across from the center is a burned out building that used to house a car battery factory before the war. It would be just another fossil, symbolizing the swift end of the socialist industrializing project had it also not been one of the many execution spots. Inside the memorial center, the white marble gravestones fill an entire meadow, representing less than half of all the genocide victims with the remaining ones still to be identified. The stones with inscriptions of prayers for the dead from the Kur'an greeted us at the entrance. Behind, on a semi-circular marble wall--resembling the Vietnam memorial in D.C.--the names of the dead, presented in an alphabetical order. Almost all of the last names repeat several times, entire families wiped out (one last name appears 34 times!). Next to the wall, "8372..." engraved on a stone, reminding the visitor that this is not the final number.

I looked around and noticed that the memorial intruded into the yards of the surrounding houses which seemed to be inhabited. "How would it be to live here?" one of my friends asked. This remark made me remember of how personal the war here has been. Unlike in most other places in the country--where atrocities were committed by mercenaries and thugs who came from the outside--the Srebrenica genocide was a local affair, mostly carried out by the Bratunac brigade (Bratunac is a small village we passed on our way to Srebrenica). After Srebrenica was declared a "safe haven" by the UN, the small Muslim forces remained holed up in the town, refusing to surrender their weapons. Instead they would carry out raids on local Serb villages while the men from these villages were out on the front-lines. The Srebrenica genocide was carried out by many of these men who had lost their loved ones in these raids. While looking at the houses surrounding the memorial I also realized that entire Serb families from this area were wiped out by Muslim and Croat Ustasha forces in World War II. The cycle of violence, maddening and brutal in its logic, is what depressed me the most about this place. I noticed that some houses had graves in their very yards, wanting to keep the memory of the dead as close to the hearth as possible.

After visiting the memorial, we entered the town, which is more like a ruin. The burned out Energoinvest building--a Yugoslav industrial giant--gapes at the center, right next to the recently reconstructed central hall building, housing the UN Development Program. The burned out factories serve as reminders that this was a place which the Communists promised to usher into a new era with their industrializing project.

Rain insisted on following us on our way out of town, the fog as dense as my melancholy. As we drove out, I noticed a few visitors at the memorial laughingly chase each other in a fit of childplay, turning the memorial--if only momentarily--into a playground. Remembering Hannah Arendt, I thought of "banality" of memory and its vulnerability to the whims of human mood.