Europe reflects on Obama victory

For years I've had the pleasure of being lectured in Europe about how racist America and Americans are. The discussions crossed the piling on stage years ago and no matter how many members of Congress, mayors, business leaders, etc I mentioned, I would still hear more about racism in deep America. It never mattered that political or business leaders were rare in Europe because America had such a poor history of race relations. I've visited plenty of offices around Europe (and beyond) and the fact that I never could see offices that represented people I saw on the street, well, that was just a fluke that occurred hundreds of times. Just because offices were almost exclusively white didn't seem to register and I didn't understand the history or culture or some other silly answer.

Let's just say the discussion is changing ever so slightly. The US continues to have problems with race but Europe remains a few decades behind.

“The election of Barack Obama highlights via a cruel contrast the shortcomings of the French Republic and the distance that separates us from a country whose citizens knew how to go beyond the racial question,” the manifesto said. It won support from Mr. Sarkozy’s wife, Carla, who told Le Journal du Dimanche, “our prejudices are insidious” and hoped the “Obama effect” would help to reshape society.

But the French model of citizenship does not allow for official distinctions by race or religion. When a legislative official here was asked for data on the number of black or Muslim legislators, he told a reporter to “look at the pictures on the Senate directory,” to judge by name and skin color.

Joseph Macé-Scaron, writing in the French-language weekly Marianne, said that the discussion of a “French Obama” was a diversion and a screen, substituting a false American model onto France. The problem here, as in other parts of Europe, he said, was less the rejection of nonwhite immigrants than the way political and cultural elites patronized and used them, “only to better block access to the top of the social ladder.”

Praising “the ‘difference’ of nonwhites locked them inside identities of resentment,” he said.

But the conservative Le Figaro blamed French minorities themselves for part of their exclusion. The paper noted that Mr. Obama’s success was based on his upbringing, education and success at integrating into the larger society and articulating its values, including patriotism.

Classic. Blaming the minorities in a major publication. Fox News and the Washington Times must be proud.