Black And White World

It's always fun to read the European perspective on America to see how they don't get us. (I'm sure they feel the same way when we talk about them.)

Here's an interesting piece from Germany on "How Obama Disappointed The World." It's the tiresome perspective that Obama has compromised too much, and has been too reasonable. We hear that plenty in America, of course, but when it comes from overseas you get a different feeling.

My favorite section starts with an old friend from Chicago:

Obama has always been cautious, says Douglas Baird, who recruited him to teach at his university in 1992. Baird, an expert on bankruptcy law, had been charged with finding new talent for the University of Chicago, which has produced dozens of Nobel laureates.

A colleague had drawn Baird's attention to Obama, an unusual black man who had made it into two of the country's elite institutions, Columbia University in New York and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When it comes to making decisions, Obama takes a wait-and-see approach, weighing the options, Baird says today, referring to his former protégé. He gathers together "enough information" before he makes a decision, Baird explains.

In Baird's experience, Obama was always courageous, demanding and even audacious. He wasn't sure how seriously Obama would take his teaching job, because the promising lawyer also wanted to go into politics. It was an experiment: a black professor who taught constitutional law, which included the history of the elimination of racial barriers, at a university where more than 90 percent of the students are white. Obama was a popular teacher, Baird recalls. "The students loved him," he says. "There were never any complaints."

One of the keys to Obama's success was that he, as a black man, was reserved. He knew exactly how to handle his white students, and what appealed to or frightened them. He was the son of a black Kenyan who had left the family when Obama was two. He was raised by his white mother and, at times, his white grandparents, in Indonesia and Hawaii, and he was raised as a white person. In fact, Obama was a white man with black skin, someone who had to teach himself how to speak the way black people did, and who started playing basketball, the most popular sport in black America, to become more comfortable in his role as a black man.

Yes, it was quite a social experiment--an actual black person standing up in front of white students and teaching them about a subject that deals with racial relations.  How would they react?  Would they ignore him?  Would they demand he be replaced?  Thank goodness Obama knew not to make any threatening gestures.  True, he's not an authentic black man, but his skin color still might scare off skittish white students.