US President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was only a legal instrument that merely established slaves and their descendants as citizens.

It couldn’t erase the mindset in American society that they are “inassimilable entities that must be confined, controlled, and exploited for their cheap labour while ensuring their social death as full citizens”.

Ever since, that mindset has stood in the way of all efforts by US blacks and their well-wishers in all facets of American society to realise their desire and quest for full American citizenship.

Right on the heels of emancipation came all manner of statutes throughout the agricultural south of the US that produced what became known as the notorious Jim Crow laws aimed at perpetuating second-class status for US blacks, as envisaged by the racist mindset, to sustain the subjugation of the black race in America.

When eventually many US blacks broke loose from the south and its Jim Crow laws and norms by migrating in great numbers to the cities of the industrial north, they were again trapped in the ghettos where the same mindset determined their existence by checking their attempts to integrate themselves as citizens.

When the Civil Rights movement liberated US blacks from the squalor of ghetto life in the 1960s, the prison industrial complex was quickly erected to keep them in their place.

Thus, prison became a rite of passage for many black males in the US, even up until today.

History indicates that people take a cue from what works for them to devise the means and tools they need to confront future challenges in their society.

Hence, the ubiquity and durability of the aforementioned mindset beyond the era of chattel slavery derived in the main from the enormous wealth that stakeholders and American society at large reaped from the non-assimilation, extensive confinement, control, and exploitation of slaves and their descendants throughout the long duration of chattel slavery.

On their part, although the descendants of slaves haven’t been complacent in their quest for full integration in US society, their awareness of the debilitating obstacle that the aforementioned mindset constitutes to their quest is cause for the anger that most of them exhibit in their daily existence in American society.

Unfortunately, more than anything else, that anger has defined and characterised them in the perception of members of the dominant Caucasian race.

Over the years, the quest by blacks in America for public office in the political arena has been stymied by the perception that they are angry actors. So much that given that the total black share in the overall US population is a mere 13 percent, it is often difficult and rare for black politicians to achieve success in electoral politics except in districts where black voters hold demographic advantage over the other racial components of America.

If the truth is to be told, presidential campaigns by the likes of the late Congresswoman Chisolm from New York, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and the Rev Al Sharpton were more symbolic than anything else.

Those campaigns energised mostly the black community alone.

Again, since the truth remains that US presidents are not elected by 13 percent of the population, black presidential candidates in America have always campaigned for the pleasure of their race.

Enter Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a Caucasian woman, and the story changes dramatically. White and black America find an unusual phenomenon, a “trailblazing figure” who “represents the future”.

The fact that Barack Obama’s advent as a political phenomenon is going against the grain of age-old orthodox patterns in quest by blacks for full participation in US society is heartening to say the least.

What began with his electoral success to represent the State of Illinois, which is extensively non-black, in the US Senate gradually blossomed into what “givesa sense of hope” mainstream America irrespective of race.

The same factor ‑ the fact that he’s not a descendant of slaves, which has made the Black Civil Rights establishment to be lukewarm towards him ‑ is indeed a huge political asset for him.

Since the Caucasians who instantly warmed to his announcement do not in any way regard him as an angry blackman, his bid for the highest office in the land did not run the risk of being stymied by the age-old mindset.

He is very much on the same footing with every other serious politician in the US.

More importantly, as someone told me once, a vital component of his viability and promise is that out of all the other major aspirants for Presidency, he is the only one who didn’t begin his presidential campaign from Jerusalem.

 

· Professor EC Ejiogu is a political sociologist and the author of “The Roots of Political Instability in Nigeria” (Ashgate Publishing, 2011).