Can Muslims trust Obama?
This gives you a sense that in America, race versus gender, there seems to be something about the American society that tends to move people in the direction of addressing the issue of race before the issue of gender and we’ll see it again. 1964 we have the civil rights act which then completes the franchise that African Americans, Asians – the Asian Exclusion Act meant that if you were a person of ancestry and Asian ancestry – that means whether you’re Chinese, Japanese, whether you were Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, if you were deemed to be Asian, then you were discriminated against in housing, applications to certain professions that were barred. The Civil Rights Act of 1954 brought Asians and African Americans and Jews and women to a status of having equal political rights to Caucasian men.
That’s important for us to look at, and show you that minorities in the United States of America have only advanced historically during times of crisis. In other words America never gives the franchise to people unless there’s a crisis. There was an industrial crisis around the time of the Civil War. It was not about just saying ‘we have not treated our negroes right.’ There was a shift in the industrial nature of the society away from a rural, non-industrial, non-mechanical source of production into a more industrialised north that was invading a non-industrialised south. And so there was a need to shift the source of labour in America into the industrialised world. And because of that it was important to emancipate African Americans – that’s one reading of history.
If we were to look at World War One, and in World War One, women were allowed to move into the industrialised work force in America. Why? Because so many men had been drawn into the war that the factories that produced munitions – even my grandmother – subhān Allah, I just remembered that. My grandmother, when she was a young girl, worked in a munitions plant. A Negro woman was allowed to work in a plant because the United States needed people to put the bombs and the guns and the bullets together. And so they took every able-bodied person, even though under normal circumstances they would have restricted women, and particularly white women, and they would be allowed to move into the industrial work force, able to earn wages and maybe even to be unionised, which was a phenomenal idea at that time.
World War Two, blacks in World War One that weren’t allowed to fight were allowed to cook, clean, to work as orderlies in the hospitals, but they weren’t allowed to hold a weapon and fight. When in World War Two they needed more man power, and so they let African Americans bear arms. Only when America’s back is up against the wall, do they release the reins of power. And so you have groups like the Tasghigi and they take the freedom of African Americans to new heights. Being able to demonstrate their ability to fly aeroplanes and to fight and to have valour, and to fight the social order. And by the way, this reference to the military is very important to the framework of the advance of the social-political majority of blacks in America. We’ll pick that up later.
When we look at the issue of racial identity. Remembering that race is a social construct, not a genetic construct, especially in the United States. I don’t know if any of you realise that if you were Egyptian, according to the State Department, it didn’t matter what the colour of your skin is, Egyptians in the United States would be classified as ‘white’. Yes, because it’s a political construct. During segregation, immigrant blacks from Africa or Asia were exempt from the codes that said if you were black – meaning an ex-slave – you’re not allowed to go to certain places; but if you are not part of the slave legacy, this is important. Then you can enjoy the rights of being – pardon the expression – an honorary white person.
So during slavery and segregation, even though the colour was the same – maybe even the country of origin was the same – but because of the state of involuntary servitude, those blacks historically, would have been excluded from any political identity. And so the phenomenon of Barak Obama is very interesting in the American political mainstream.
Barak Obama does not share a slave legacy. Therefore, his identity in the American mainstream is not the identity of an ex-slave. He’s exempt. So he enjoys the status of an immigrant like an Irish or a Polish or others, and he has the benefit of identifying himself as a person of mixed race, which affords him a different position in the racial construct of America.
Right now in the United States there’s an explosion (if I can use that word...because you know a lot of the time with Muslims there are certain words you can’t use, like the word ‘explosion’). [Audience laugh] There have been explosions in interracial movements in America, and the American military historically is the place in America where mixed race peoples and inter-racial marriages are most accepted. Some people who are part of the military who have inter racial marriages (black-white is the most obvious one) many of them say that when they are serving and they have to live near the military base, they would rather live on base in the south, than to live off base. Because on the military base you are respected by how many stripes or bars you have on your shoulder. But when they walk off the base they are judged not as a captain or a colonel or a lieutenant or whether they’re black or white, and they’re not accepted in their inter-racial union. So they would rather live on base with other military families like ourselves. So the American military really has been the example of the best place for the racial question to be worked out and I think for many of us, we owe Eisenhower a great debt of gratitude.
But there is in America a growing acceptance of the baby boomers who all grew up with the Beatles and the hippies and the whole free movement. So that population now who were the baby boomers are the ones who are driving now the political engine in America. And so you have in America now, the phenomenon of race choice. You could choose one race – I’m of mixed race but I choose one race. Maybe on some level the Barak Obama phenomenon is interesting; Barak Obama can choose. Some choose ‘other’ when asked ‘what’s your race? What do you mean other?’ Others say I am not one race or another; I don’t even want to get involved in the race question. Most Americans historically choose one, because of what we call the ‘one drop rule’ – does anyone know what the one drop rule is? If you add one drop of ethnicity into the white paint you are of the ‘other’. So there’s no grey. If somebody is mixed race, they’re black. You say ‘I’m not black’ – Tiger Woods right? He had to say ‘I’m not black.’ We say ‘come on Tiger, what you saying, we seen the pictures...’ and he says ‘I’m not black!’ He has been allowed in the current context not to be black.
Now I’m going to talk about Michael Jackson [audience laugh]. Now Barak Obama has been able to identify himself as both black and white. When he’s in Chicago he’s black, when he’s in Kansas he’s white, and when he’s in Hawai’i he’s Hawaiian [audience laugh]. He actually is Hawaiian because he was born there. Remember I talked about national origin versus nationality. Now if he had been born in Hawai’i just a little bit earlier, he wouldn’t have been able to run for president. But because of the accident of birth in that place is so far away from the United States I don’t know how they call it the United States. But because of that, when he goes to Hawai’i, he’s going to carry Hawai’i, because they want the native son to be President. He’s going to win Kansas because he’s going to stand next to his white relatives who accept him because they want their relative to be in the White House – you see all of Kansas is going to get invited to the White House. You see? The political realities.
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