Tears came to my eyes, as I’m sure they did to the eyes of millions of black people all over planet earth, when Barack Obama, the son of an African (Kenyan) father and a white American mother, was elected President of the United States of America in 2008.

A couple weeks after his inauguration, Barack and his wife were hosting a social function at the White House when one or two strange guests appeared who had not been invited. Those of us who are cynics, concluded that the American secret service was sending a message to Mr. Obama: you are not safe; things can happen to you.

The election of a man of color to the leadership of the most powerful nation in the world was more symbolic than anything else. Barack was owned and controlled by the same forces which own and control any other U.S. president.

It has been an exciting few days in American politics since President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party announced over the weekend that he was stepping down as his party’s November 2024 presidential candidate, and then endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, to run as the Democratic candidate against Republican Donald Trump in the presidential election this November.

Kamala Harris, very well-qualified and experienced in public life, is the daughter of a Jamaican father of color and an Indian (Asian) mother. She therefore excited Americans of color and also the forces of women empowerment who are fighting the ban on abortion which is now possible due to the lifting of the Roe vs Wade protections by a Republican-controlled Supreme Court.

I was moved by Kamala’s speech and demeanour, not to mention her good looks, but the Obama precedent tells me I cannot expect anything from her, if she is elected president, which would be different from the administration of any other American president, who have all been considered Caucasian (despite the remonstrations of J. A. Rogers) except for Barack.

I now beg your indulgence to reproduce a section of a paper published in The London Review of Books dated February 22, 2018. The article is entitled, “Why do white people like what I write,” and is written by one Pankaj Mishra and is essentially a review of a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which is entitled, WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY. The paragraphs reproduced below from Mishra’s article appear on page 19 of that particular London Review.

There were signs during Obama’s campaign, particularly his eagerness to claim the approbation of Henry Kissinger, that he would cruelly disappoint his left-leaning young supporters’ hopes of epochal transformation. His actions in office soon made it clear that some version of bait and switch had occurred. Obama had condemned the air war in South Asia as immoral because of its high civilian toll, but three days after his inauguration he ordered drone strikes in Pakistan, and in his first year oversaw more strikes with high civilian casualties than Bush had ordered in his entire presidency. His bellicose speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize signalled that he would strengthen rather than dismantle the architecture of the open-ended war on terror, while discarding some of its fatuous rhetoric. During his eight years in office, he expanded covert operations and air strikes deep into Africa; girding the continent with American military bases, he exposed large parts of it to violence, anarchy and tyrannical rule. He not only expanded mass surveillance and government data mining operations at home, and ruthlessly prosecuted whistleblowers, but invested his office with the lethal power to execute anyone, even American citizens, anywhere in the world.

Obama occasionally denounced the “fat cats” of Wall Street, but Wall Street contributed heavily to his campaign, and he entrusted his economic policy to it early in his tenure, bailing out banks and the insurance mega-company AIG with no quid pro quo. African Americans had turned out in record numbers in 2008, demonstrating their love of an ostensible compatriot, but Obama ensured that he would be immune to the charge of loving blacks too much. Colour-blind to the suffering caused by mortgage foreclosures, he scolded African-Americans, using the neoliberal idiom of individual responsibility, for their moral failings as fathers, husbands and competitors in the global marketplace. Nor did he wish to be seen as soft on immigration; he deported millions of immigrants — Trump is struggling to reach Obama’s 2012 peak of 34,000 deportations a month. In his memoir, Dreams from my Father, he had eloquently sympathised with the marginalised and the powerless. In power, however, he seemed in thrall to Larry Summers and other members of the East Coast establishment, resembling not so much the permanently alienated outsider as the mixed-race child of imperialism, who, as Ashis Nandy diagnosed in The Intimate Enemy, replaces his early feeling for the weak with “an unending search for masculinity and status”. It isn’t surprising that this harbinger of hope and change anointed a foreign policy hawk and Wall Street-friendly dynast as his heir apparent. His post-presidency moves — kite-surfing with Richard Branson on a private island, extravagantly remunerated speeches to Wall Street and bromance with George Clooney — have confirmed Obama as a case of mistaken identity. As David Remnick, his disappointed biographer, said recently, “I don’t think Obama was immune to lures of the new class of wealth. I think he’s very interested in Silicon Valley, stars and showbusiness, and sports, and the rest.”