I always seem to be traveling when exciting things are happening.  I just got back this morning from four days in Paris, where I had to go for our annual Board of Directors meeting (and took the opportunity in addition to meet a number of investors and government officials), and so I was in a Paris hotel for the US elections. 

I am delighted with the results, of course.  Obama is a brilliant thinker and a charismatic figure, and has shown himself to be willing to listen to people who know more than he does, however without fobbing onto them the ultimate responsibility for making the decision.  More importantly, he graduated from Columbia University, and so he definitely owns my loyalty.  But like many others I seriously worry about whether he can even come close to realizing some of the fantastic expectations placed on him by Americans and by people around the world. 

It was interesting to see the results in France.  Of course in discussing this I am stepping away from any discussion of Chinese financial markets, but this seems to be enough of an historical event that it merits some digression.  Most French seem to support Obama, but perhaps he has unfortunately become almost a messianic figure to some.  I watched a television report from one of the poorer northern towns heavily populated by immigrants and their children, and the rapture and excitement of his election exceeded even the happiness in Hyde Park.  Men and women were screaming with happiness, the halls exploded with dancing and cheering, and hundreds of those present chanted “We have our president, we have our president!”  But he is not their president, and they may be seriously overestimating what Obama can do for them.

In the program the journalists interviewed two young Frenchmen – one black and one Muslim.  They were very smart, very serious, and the point they were making worried me a lot.  They explained that for years France was way behind the US in racism and its treatment of ethnic minorities.  With the election of Obama, they said, the US had taken a huge step forward, leaving France even further behind, and they expected that France, too, had to take a major step forward.  Obama was their inspiration to expect more from France (I suspect this kind of thinking is happening everywhere in Europe).

Of course they are right, but in the US the discourse on race and ethnicity is an old and fiery one, and far more advanced than any in Europe – when I grew up in Spain and France we were able to say and do things without thinking that, I later learned when I moved to the US for university, should have been completely unacceptable.  Saying or doing many of those things still isn’t unacceptable in most of Europe.

I am enough of a realist to know that racism isn’t resolved by friendly dialogue and feel-good announcements by official bodies, but rather by confrontation, disputation and hard work.