While Obama claims to seek the "transcending of race" in the United States, his campaign for the White House is having quite opposite effects elsewhere in the world. According to the New York Times, Obama's success is spurring African youth in France - where institutionalised laïcité suppresses the recognition of religious and racial identities - to return to Négritude, the black intellectual movement of the 1920s and 30s that was pioneered by the late Franco-Caribbean writer and politician Aimé Césaire.
Ongoing social unrest in France has unearthed real and undeniable racial fault-lines, yet the French republican system with its pretensions of universalism refuses to categorise French citizens into minority/majority groups. Obama's rise in the US has only added fuel to the fire. As the NYT reports:
Since it abolished slavery 160 years ago, [France] has officially declared itself to be colorblind — but seeing Mr. Obama, a new generation of French blacks is arguing that it’s high time here for precisely the sort of frank discussions that in America have preceded the nomination of a major black candidate...
This black consciousness is reflected not just in daily conversation, but also in a dawning culture of books and music by young French blacks... Négritude and Césaire are back. When Césaire died in April, at 94, his funeral in Fort-de-France, Martinique, was broadcast live on French television. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his rival Ségolène Royal both attended. Just three years ago, Mr. Sarkozy, as head of a center-right party and not yet president, supported a law (repealed after much protest) that compelled French schools to teach the “positive” aspects of colonialism. The next year, Césaire refused to meet with him. Now here was Mr. Sarkozy flying to the former French colony (today one of the country’s overseas departments, meaning he could troll for votes) to pay tribute to the poet laureate of négritude.
Léonora Miano, a Cameroon-born French novelist, agrees that while the "black community" is a fiction, political "blackness" isn't:
“There is no such thing as a black ‘community’ in France — yet — partly because we have such different histories,” she said. “An immigrant woman from Mali and another from Cameroon view the world in completely different ways. You also shouldn’t think there isn’t racism among blacks in France, between West Indians and Africans. There is. But ultimately we’re all black in the face of discrimination.”
Then she smiled: “Too bad I forgot to wear my Obama T-shirt.”
It is a measure of Obama's appeal that people across the world are projecting the politics of their own circumstances on to him. "Obama the uniter", who in America has managed to submerge the political weight of his blackness, appears an altogether different entity in France. Here, he is the symbol of the urgency of race and its affirmation, rather than its sublimation.
