Religion, Race, and Nationality in the Obama Era

Image by futureatlas.com via FlickrOur first black president. That is what a lot of people are calling Barack Obama. He seems to include himself among those who identify him not as mixed race, not as white who happens to have an African father, not as Hawaiian, not as any of the identities in the melting pot of identities that he could adopt if he chose, but as black.
I personally believe that his choice was a powerful one which will bring all Americans closer to a level of acceptance and respect for one another that has often been coloured by color. The absolute hopefulness that a black man becoming president represents is one of those things that, as one British journalist put it, could only happen in America.
What I find truly amazing about Obama, and also really hopeful, is the way that he has, as much as Jay Gatsby, defined who he is in the world. Half American, half Kenyan, yet here he is as the pillar of American conciousness. A middle name of Hussein, and a mother whose religious beliefs were quite open and free, Obama chose to be a Christian, and a Christian whose flavour of Christianity is deeply rooted in an African-American culture. Half white, half black, yet look at his diction, at his mannerisms, at his rhetoric, and it is clear that he has made a conscious and sustained effort to behave as a black man. Nowhere in his speech can you hear the Hawaiian influences, despite him having grown up there. In fact, you hear the speech of an urban black man, and specifically an urban black man from Chicago. That, despite the fact that he was raised by a white grandmother from Kansas. But he had choices, and he made choices. Certainly, as a half black man in America, the perception would probably always be there that he was 'black.' Obama chose to make that a positive thing, though, to embrace that identity that was assumed, no matter how at variance it may have been at first with who he 'really' was, how he was raised. That America accepts and believes in those choices is itself a very hopeful thing.
My own family is just such a melting pot, and for the sake of my son, half Japanese, half American, being raised in the UK, and my neice, who had a similar background to Obama, right down to being brought up in one of the last two states in the Union, today is a very hopeful day in the history of America. It is the day that a man who chose to be black has become president. That a man who chose to be American became president. That his choices were not only accepted, but embraced, is a cause for celebration. This is the America that I feel immensly proud of, the America whose ideal is hope, the America that, should my son choose it, is a country where not genetics, background, language, or anything else determines who we are, but where we make choices about all of those things.
There is a lot of hope in that. A lot of hope that real change, a time when none of those things even matter, is just that much closer to reality. We aren't there yet, but today, January 20th, 2009, we just stepped closer.