On Ending the Series on Obama Inspired Articles

I am ending my articles on Obama and the effect of his presidency and moving to other issues. I intend to keep this blog open and might update it after this.

I will soon post a link to the follow up blog and series of articles that I will be posting.

Bruck

By the Content of their Charachter..

....and not by the color of their skin (or how foreign their names may sound...)


When the News Networks called the election for Obama, the crowd that I was surrounded by began to chant "Obama" repeatedly. Some of them were jumping up and down, some clapping and others were clenching their fists in victory. What got my attention was all the people, strung from all the races and places in the world were chanting, what Obama himself called 'a funny name'. Immediately, something struck me.


I imagined millions and millions in the world seized in that historic moment and chanting the name of an african man, from an obscure village in Kenya, whose son now carries his name and has made it a household name across the world.


Dr. Martin Luther King's dream of a time "...that they will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their charachte...." had come true. It could also be interpreted to mean or include not just colours of skin but also name.....something like " ... not by the wierdness of their name, but by the content of character..."


Obama's victory is for all those people whose names are not Jackson, Henderson, Smith and Jones. It is for all those living in cultures where their name, no matter how meaningful and beautiful may sound in another language beyond the horizon, sounds weird and warrants a repetition or spelling at every office and infront of every clerk.


I remember all my ethioisraeli friends in Israel who had taken up Israeli sounding names as kids. Some by the decisions of their parents others by the decision of their teachers. One friend ahs even told me how the teacher had let other students choose a name for her, as she foudn her ethiopian name to hard to pronounce. 'Ordinary' sounding names were thought to usher their assimilation in Israel society. Almost all of them had reverted to their Ethiopian names once they had grown up and their experience had shown them that the key to assimilation was not in their names.


That night, when the students went shouting "Obama, Obama" on their way out..... For me it was the same as if they were chanting any african name or any asian name. It might have been the same if they were shouting Abebe, Li, Huan, Hailu or "______".



Caveat
Ofcourse one should note that Obama's name is simple to pronounce. Even babies say it easily, it has O, ba, and ma (sylables easy enough for kids to say and remember). Names which are hard to pronounce don't make an easy chant line nor do they fit in the name memory slots of human brains easily. Imagine a crowd of europeans chanting "Gebreegzihabher".....in Berlin on Senator Gebreegzihabher (D-Il) world tour. Somehow it sucks out all the excitement out of it.

White, Red, Brown and Black

White, red, brown and black?- if you have to choose.

The concept of skin color has been on my mind ever since I had moved out of my country of birth, and started living in a country where the majority of the people have less pigmentation than I do. Obviously, this had not disturbed me back in Ethiopia. Once I was in Israel, though it was the first thing that I discovered about myself, I look darker than most people. It is not that I never knew that,  I did know that but it did not seem important then. I remember the first two or three weeks in Israel, my skin looked darker to me than it ever was. Call it culture shock, or increase in self-consciousness but it really did make me notice that for most people that might be the first thing they notice about me.

In Ethiopia, people refer to skin color as white (reserved to yes! You guessed it- white people), red (key- someone like Barack Obama), teyim (brown skinned—let us say Mandella) and black ( meaning dark complexioned). There were connotation to skin color embedded in the language, culture and history, that tended to associate, the red complexioned people to nobility, and the dark complexioned people to lower status in the society. Yet this was nothing automatic, there were light skinned kings and dark skinned kings. Poor people of “red” complexion of the skin and wealthy “black” people.

So most Ethiopians, undergo the transformation of being reclassified as black once they come to countries where the color code is quite different to the one they were familiar with. I, for one, never was fooled by this sub-classification. I was the darker than most of my siblings, my mother and I were brown skinned. My sister and brother, are light skinned and so is my father. Some among my country men learn that they are really black and not 'red' or 'teyim', in the land beyond the seas. There they meet a whole different rule of classification, where it could be more of “ if it ain’t white, it is black”.

I am not going to go into the discussion of black-white dichotomy. I am sorry to disappoint, if there are who are disappointed. I guess I am just reminded on how language and words on the meanings they carry. The phrase ‘black man’ as used in English seems so outdated and hopefully is becoming less and less politically correct. The term white man is no more politically correct.

In a way the greatest political incorrectness in the use of the word black man or white man is not the color we attach to it, but it is the way we classify the world into white, yellow and black. Like all dichotomies the removal of one part of the dichotomy defeats the dichotomy as a whole. Perhaps that is why we should drop the use of the word black man first. Soon the word, white man will be a reference that is as meaningless as the word black man.

Polls, Kadima and September 11

The first thing that I check in the morning when I sit on my computer is the numbers. Yes, the US election polls! The national polling result, the battleground states, who is leading, the favourablity ratings in short I check it as if I am a pundit on some political blog or a volunteer at a campaign office.

Meanwhile, in Israel, Olmert is definitely standing down. The primary race is between Livni and Mofaz. But I don't check that on a day to day basis. The race is likely to be between Livni and Mofaz, whoever gets the reins of Kadima will get the government. They say Livni is the darling of the left and Mofaz wants to bomb the nuclear out of his birthland. In a way I think that my life will be more affected by who wins the White House than the Siat Kadima. Even if it is Livni, I think Israel will take the necessary action to protect itself from a nuclear Iran.

When the planes crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, I was in Ethiopia. My parents had called from Israel and I had gone into a neighbours house to speak to them since the phone at home was out of order. As I went in their living room to speak in their landline phone, they were perched on their sofa and watching CNN intently. I finished the conversation and joined what was gaining their attention. The South Tower had just crashed and they were watching that as if it was a new action movie. I was dumbstruck, couldn't believe my eyes. The twin tower has fallen and planes were crashed into the buildings purposely by terrorists! I was like trying to comprehend the monostrous consequences of that. I said to my neighbours 'this is big and we are watching history'. They did not understand my excitement, shock and disbelief.

The World did change that day. It changed in many ways. When America went around the world making a statement, I noticed the changes that Sept. 11 wrought in my life. As a consequence of the decisions of the US Administration, some countries were made stronger, like Iran; the US had given a blind eye and deaf ear as its Allies in the War Against Terrorism trampled on citizens' rights and bend and broke human rights. I think my life has been changed tremendously as a result of Sept 11, may be that is why I am more interested in the US elections than the Israeli party politics.

BT

Obama, A New Job, Hope and Fear

By Baruch Munna

The world is paying attention these days to the nomination of Barack Obama as the first ever African American candidate of a major party for the presidency of the strongest country in the world. Well, like most people, I have been paying attention to that for sometime now. Ever since Barack Obama announced that he was going to run for president in February 2007, I was checking up the news outlets on the fate of the junior senator from Illinois on a regular basis.

That was when I was just past my first semester at graduate school and a month into a new job. It happens that I was having lunch with two of my newfound colleagues, when our talk about food turned to exotic foods and then to the mix of cultures, and then I was suddenly reminded of the African American senator's bid for presidency and I decided to update my new colleagues on the news I read a few days ago.

"Have you heard?" I said shifting the conversation, and told them about the Black senator who was bidding to be the next occupant of the White House. They scoffed at my story, "A black man in the United States as President?" I just said, "Well, we shall see…." but they went on to remind me how racist America really is by citing their experiences in the US. I could not argue for or against based on experience, since by then I had never been to the US and all that I know of the country was what I read, saw on TV or heard from those who had been there. Well we never really did discuss Barack Obama; until he was all over the news outlets and the fever of his ascendancy in the Democratic primaries were all over the news. By January 2008 and after the Iowa caucus, one of my colleagues who had remained to work in the company had officially become an Obama supporter. We then began to freely discuss, if he really can beat the former first lady. Well, he won Iowa, and won South Carolina riding the African American voters' wave, but can he really win the Nomination, we would chew through our food druing lunch breaks.

Meanwhile, my classes had really advanced over the year and were approaching the end of my graduate studies. So it was that I met a friend on the corridors of the university who had just finished classes like I did and was preparing to start a new job. Unlike me, she never worked professionally and she was quite stressed about it. She had just finished a study of 5 years where she studied her first and second degree without a break in between.

With a post graduate degree in hand and a mother tongue hebrew and a good command of English, she had eased into the jobmarket with an advantage over her peers. However, the idea of becoming a full time employee really scared her. She had already got a job as a clerk in a government office. She was wondering that what she had studied in her two degrees had nothing to do with what she is going to do. Her whole perspective of the professional world was filled with pessimism. She was not expecting anything positive from her first ever job. Her sense of the future was clearly not promising and I tried to talk her out of her pessimism. I told her that I did not have any idea of what I wanted to do when I graduated too and that she will need to see the professional world for herself to really find out what she wants to do in life and to know how she can do that.

She took note of my advice and asked me why I think she feels so negative at this time while she should really appreciate the path she came and what she accomplished. I had to tell her what I think and told her that she was putting up a defense system as she is stepping out for the first time to face the world of professional work. She has her concerns and fears, and lowering her expectations bar by thinking negatively was what she was doing. After all she is a black woman, living in a mostly white country where not quite a few people doubt if she is Jewish at all. Well I had to hand it to her. As they say friends are those that tell you what you don't want to hear. To my surprise, she agreed to my explanation. "You know" she said, "I never thought that I had negative expectations for my future here in Israel, until a few months ago…" so she started telling me that she met Ethiopian Americans that came to visit Jerusalem and she had a chance to acquaint with them. They had a question for her. "Why do people stare at us in the streets?" To her surprise she had a quick response for them, she quipped "It must be because you were speaking in English and most Israeli's are surprised to hear Ethiopians speak English." Her answer surprised her more than it surprised them. She told me that she started really paying attention to all the negative thoughts she hoards in the back of her mind about her life as an Israeli of Ethiopian origin in Israel. Amazingly, she was born in Israel and does not even speak Amharic, the Ethiopian language. Yet many see her and treat her as a new immigrant in her daily life.

So our conversation drifted to Obama as conversations do often these days, well at least to me they do. We wondered people's perception of black people in Israel might change if he gets elected. She confessed that she was in dilemma. "As a black woman," she said, "I am for his election and as a Jew, I hear he will not be good for Israel and don't want him to win."

I have spent hours reading talk back comments from Ynet to Jerusalem Post and all that you read is the hostility most Israeli's have towards Obama. In my humble opinion, I think most Israeli's find it hard to accept that a man whose father was a Muslim will not have sympathy to the Arab world. Well the truth is most (or so I think) Israelis come from Jewish parents from both sides and are not exposed to a mix marriage out of their religion, let alone race. I, for one having come from a mix marriage have no problem taking Obama at his word. If he thinks he identifies as American and is a Christian fine with me. After all, the only thing he has taken from his father is his name. Maybe it is because of the fact that Israel is more or less a homogenous nation state or so we tend to think that the make up of Obama scares us. The US is definitely on the way of being more of a multicultural state, the rise of a multiracial and multicultural candidate maybe the strongest indication of that.

Hope is perhaps what I can share with my lady friend as to the fate of Israel's black population, would there be a time ever that a black man can rise to an occasion of this magnitude in Israel. Well not in the near future anyway, but as Dr. King dreamt a generation ago so can we that one day we shall cease to fear and start to hope even if it means on a small thing as our first job out of university. After all we came to live and be a part of Israel, not to stand aside and watch.

The writer is an Ethiopian Israeli, who can be reached on baruchmuna@gmail.com