Con ese “hasta cierto punto” quiero decir que sin duda algo ha debido cambiar en la sociedad yanqui para que algo que hasta hace bien poco parecia imposible haya ocurrido. Sin duda es indicativo de que es menos racista, pero hay una serie de desigualdades e injusticias estructurales que esta victoria no ha cambiado ni creo que cambie. Además, no hay que olvidar que Obama ha llegado hasta ahí derechizando progresivamente sus compromisos políticos hasta el punto de que en el fondo se diferencian más bien poco de los de su rival McCain.

Vale, un negro puede llegar a la Casa Blanca. Pero, ¿puede llegar allí alguien que quiera realmente cambiar las cosas y tenga un proyecto consistente para ello? Me temo que no. En ese sentido, que Obama sea negro es totalmente irrelevante.; veo poco motivo para las celebraciones.

Un par de recomendaciones.

Jeremy Seabrook en The Guardian:

“Poor prisoners of faith! Just as more than 10 per cent of black males between the ages of 30 and 34 are in a prison population of 2.3 million, so a majority of blacks in the USA are prisoners of ideologies which promote equality in everything but economic status. Whatever penal reforms might be possible, it is not within Obama’s power to release anyone, black or white, from the abstract ghettos or the carceral institutions which are inseparable from the veneration of success, of which Obama himself is both embodiment and emblem.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/05/barack-obama

Walter Benn Michaels en New Left Review:

“It is the increasing gap between rich and poor that constitutes the inequality, and rearranging the race and gender of those who succeed leaves that gap untouched. In actually existing neoliberalism, blacks and women are still disproportionately represented both in the bottom quintile—too many—and in the top quintile—too few—of American incomes. In the neoliberal utopia that the Obama campaign embodies, blacks would be 13.2 per cent of the (numerous) poor and 13.2 per cent of the (far fewer) rich; women would be 50.3 per cent of both. For neoliberals, what makes this a utopia is that discrimination would play no role in administering the inequality; what makes the utopia neoliberal is that the inequality would remain intact. Worse: it is not just that the inequality remains intact but also—since it is no longer produced by discrimination—that it gets legitimated.”
http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2731

Un saludo

El color de la piel del presidente es un dato hasta cierto punto irrelevante, lo que importa es lo que haga.