Americans need not worry about the vast shifts in the racial composition of the new world order. We’ve got all the bases (or races) covered.
The United States is now in the middle of a pivot from being not just a leader of The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to also becoming the leader of a world where the Pacific and South Atlantic will be just as important. We are pivoting from being the leader of the Free (white) World to a leader of the freed world.
Fairly soon now the top five economies in the world will be The United States, China, Japan, India and Brazil. None are North Atlantic unless we want to continue to claim that we are primarily that. We don’t have to. Our Pacific shoreline (counting Hawaii and Alaska) is three times as long as our Atlantic.
European economies are in shambles; and of the 20 fastest growing economies in the world none are white; but technically neither is the United States. Back before the 1960s there was something called White America, and something called Black America; but those entities do not exist anymore except in the minds of those who fear giving them up.
We often act as if we all crossed over and participate in what was once white American culture, a culture which places a high value on materialistic individualism. What seems very apparent, if we choose to look at it, is that we formed a new American culture which now places an increased value on spiritual connectedness.
In the 2012 Presidential election, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the candidates who deified materialistic individualism, lost. Barack “We Take Care of Each Other” Obama won.
It is comfortable, and perhaps in some ways wise, for us to believe that our First Family is just like other First Families, only with dark skin. But they are not. They bring cultural support for a different range of universal human aspirations.
As fate (or fortune) would have it Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 at the very beginning of the decade when White America and Black America began to disappear.
He was born in, and influenced by, the culture of the most Asian (or Pacific) part of our nation. In 1961 more than 80% of Hawaii’s population was of Asian origin. If we speak of cultural influences, Obama is not just black and white but also part Asian.
This matters because cultural influences matter. Fortunately, as far as national identity is concerned our nation, like our President, has been deeply influenced by the three great racial/cultural strands of the human species. Obama “R” Us, collectively!
Shortly after the 2008 election our team began working on an interactive, world-sourced book called Barack Obama, America, and the World. We wanted to get reactions of people from around the nation to the range of universal human aspirations that Barack Obama brought to the most powerful office on earth.
On blogging sites around the world we published more than 300 posts which suggested what people might take these aspirations to be. We collected over 2000 responses from a wide range of demographic categories.
We posted for comments such ideas as:
"Our President’s ability to move through life without being propelled by anger as most of us are, might be better understood by looking at the Asian cultural influence of his having grown up in Hawaii."
Maria Lau, a Chinese Canadian respondent commented: “Instead of his ego being a static target for the insults heaped upon him, he had placed himself in “The Flow of Zen”. What is the flow of Zen? In “The Zen of Forgiveness” I wrote about some of the complexities that Ms. Lau took it to be, with regrads to a person and a nation.
Because of his skin color and Michelle LaVaughn Robinson's family that our President married into, the predominantly cultural influences of Kansas, Columbia, and Harvard were deeply “colored” by African American cultural/historical reality. American writers, sociologists and thinkers have defined this reality largely in negative terms; but in “Twoness” and the American Dream” I took my lead from The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Dubois to say what is good about it.
Reacting to “Twoness” and the American Dream”, Ethiopian-American writer El Shaddai Gebreyes commented:
"President Obama represents 'a mind comfortable with paradox' evident in his biracial background and the bipartisan nature of his politics. . . . Obama can create a new dimension, a harmony with warring ideals and strive to enliven the American spirit. Perhaps Obama can 'paint with all the colors of the wind' and invite progress from paradox instead of economic stagnation and socio-political division.
For the sake of both our domestic and foreign policies, we need to explore in an intelligent orderly manner who our President is, and who we really are. The United States is by far the best nation to help the world find the most workable balance between materialistic individualism and spiritual connectedness. But first we as a nation must find peace, as our President has, with these two warring, universally human ideals.
George Davis is author of the new spiritual spy novel, The Melting Points, about three women pursued by danger as the clockwork universe melts around them. Just published is the 40th Anniversary Edition of Coming Home, Davis’ novel upon which the Academy Award winning, Jane Fonda, Vietnam War film of the same name was based.