Europeans and how they talk about Obama, race, and the presidential election

By Konstantin Vössing, Summer Intern at the Kirwan Institute


If Europeans were able to participate in the American presidential election, Barack Obama would be supported by 84 % of the French, 61 out of a 100 Germans, and by five times as many Britons as his opponent. (footnote #1) His European ‘voters’, however, are not necessarily predisposed to support a ‘minority’ candidate in a ‘real’ election at home, when the question about candidate preference is not just hypothetical. Moreover, it is only too evident that Mahgrebin and African immigrants in France, Turks in Germany, as well as Pakistani and Indians in Britain, are grossly underrepresented and excluded from the political arena.

The relative indifference of European media and observers to the issue of race in the debate about the presidential election is indicative of a discourse about systematic disadvantage of ‘minorities’ in Europe that tends to revolve around dividing lines defined by religion or immigrant status. This can be a blessing, because voters in Europe, contrary to voters in the United States, don’t seem to perceive Obama’s skin color as an obstacle to support him. In a broader context, this translates into a colorblindness that can be healthy, both in everyday situations and in political discourse. But the ‘European approach’ can also be a curse. How would those European Obama enthusiasts react, if racially or otherwise excluded groups in their own country pushed more forcefully for greater recognition? Would they even be willing to acknowledge that there is such a thing as race-based exclusion?

This is how Léonora Miano put it, an author, originally from Cameroon, and now native to France, in a recent interview with the New York Times:

“There’s total hypocrisy here. For me it was really strange when I arrived 17 years ago to find people here never used the word race. French universalism, the whole French republican ideal, proposes that if you embrace French values, the French language, French culture, then race doesn’t exist and it won’t matter if you’re black. But of course it does. So we need to have a conversation, and slowly it is coming: not a conversation about guilt or history, but about now.”

Colorblindness is deeply engrained and institutionalized in the French constitutional tradition, and to some extent unique to France. A certain lack of attention to the presence of racial discrimination, however, is a more universal feature of political discourses all across Europe. Like in so many other areas, a transatlantic learning process is necessary. This should be a conversation, however, that works interactively in both directions, and that takes into account both the blessing and the curse inherent in the way in which Europeans approach the issue of race.

(footnote #1) The figure for France comes from a survey conducted by the Pew Center, the German figure is from a survey by the weekly magazine Der Stern, and the value for Britain is noted by the daily newspaper The Guardian.