at Disneyland, everyone on the same page.
As the 2008 primaries began, so did the predictions. The reporters in Greece, the ones in Australia and Amsterdam and Dublin, all of them assured me that America would never elect a black president.
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’ll bet you that half of America could elect a half-black president.”
“No way,” said the German who’d once spent a week in Los Angeles, the Brazilian whose wife was from Tennessee, the Englishman who’d seen Borat four times. Everyone was an expert, and what they all knew was this: Americans are racist.
It always sounds false when white people talk about how gentle and color-blind they are. “One thing I’ve learned from my many Asian, Latino, and African American friends is that we’re all brothers under the skin.” Statements like this make me queasy, but they’re really no worse than the often heard “How could I be racist when my first boyfriend was black?”
My first boyfriend was black as well, but that doesn’t prove I’m color-blind, just that I like big butts.
If I’m walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I’ll say, “Hello.” This because, if I don’t say it, he or she might think that I’m anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I’d walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians.
Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I’m more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people. I think a lot of Americans are. Thus, when questioned by foreign journalists, I’d predict with confidence that Obama would win.
This would get me a shake of the head and a look that translated in five languages to “Poor dreamer.”
As in every election since 1998, I voted absentee and spent the month of October traveling across the United States on a lecture tour. It was all presidential campaign all the time, and what I liked was the directness of it. In France there’s a far-right political party called the National Front. Blame the immigrants, stop building mosques, down with the EU: their policies are fairly predictable. The National Front’s then leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, defined the Nazi occupation of his country as “not particularly inhumane” and had twenty-five convictions against him, an assortment ranging from grievous bodily harm to anti-Semitism to condoning war crimes. He’s an older guy, pale, his eyes made small by thick-lensed glasses.
When political campaigns are held in France, you see posters on the street, but they’re rarely attached to a home or business, the way they are in the States. Drive through any American city in the month before an election, and every other house will have a sign in front of it. So-and-so for president, for county commissioner, for town slut, etc. I also appreciate that Americans wear campaign buttons—identifiers saying either “You and I are alike,” “I am a huge asshole,” or, in the case of a third-party nominee, “I don’t mind wasting my vote.” It makes everyone so wonderfully easy to pigeonhole. I only wish that the buttons could be larger, the size of plates, at least. That way you could read them from a greater distance and have more time to activate your scowl. Still, it beats what you get in France, which is nothing. No pins, no bumper stickers. You can’t ask people who they voted for either. It’s considered rude.
I thought about this in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen won a primary in our village. After the votes were tallied, I took a walk, looking into the windows of people I thought I knew and thinking, You? Really? Those same neighbors unwilling to discuss their own election were, of course, more than happy to talk about mine. After the 2008 conventions it was all we talked about. “So who are you voting for, Obama or McCain?” they wanted to know.
I said to Hugh, “They have to ask?” I mean, really, you’d hope it would be evident.
After my month in the United States, I flew back to France, arriving on the morning of November 4, just as Americans were going to the polls. At Charles de Gaulle Airport, I caught a cab. The driver was listening to talk radio, and during my long ride into Paris, the callers explained why my candidate could never win. “Americans are racist,” they said. “Americans are afraid of anything different.” You’d think that Obama was the French candidate for president of the United States, that’s how possessive and