Following Barack Obama’s conciliatory “race” speech in March this year, mainstream critics fell over themselves to congratulate him. For some it meant turning the attention on themselves. Such was Roger Cohen, a columnist for the International Herald Tribune, who wrote a rambling piece (also published in the New York Times) arguing essentially that Obama allowed him to lose his fear of black people (Cohen grew up in Apartheid South Africa). It included this scene:
“Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside [seemingly Kalk Bay] harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.
The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.”
I did not make that up.
I had forgotten about Cohen until I read a piece in the New York Review of Books on how Kofi Annan should get the bulk of the credit for the Kenyan peace process as, with few exceptions, Kenyan politicians were selfish. (Separately The Christian Science Monitor, credited a larger cast of characters.) The piece also tried to lay to rest Annan’s failed leadership of the UN during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
What stood out in the piece, however, you guessed it was how Cohen used the Kenyan crisis to include an obligatory Obama reference. Instead of learning something from his Kenya experience or about Obama, Cohen comes with his own answers. For example, when he rejects the insights of Obama’s sister, Auma, who lives in Kenya that the post-election violence was not “tribal” or an ethnic thing, but the consequence of a lack of democracy and the inequitable distribution of resources. Even worse is this “insight” on Obama:
His American birth had allowed Barack Obama to escape [the tribalism that .. earlier this year plunged Kenya into its worst post- independence crisis]. Nobody cared about circumcision in Hawaii or Cambridge or Chicago.
And the white tribalism in the US?
[New York Review of Books]
Come come Sean. We all know you made that up.
Cohen, er, should be, er, shot. That’s what I want to say – though I know I shouldn’t really say nasty things in this nice world.
I’ll bite. Cohen is quite correct in his rejection of Auma Obama’s description of the violence as not ethnic. It’s pretty clear that victims were selected by ethnicity, and that the killers justified their murders on ethnic grounds.
Explanation which attempt to obscure the independent force of ethnicity are, as I argued here simply mistaken – and obviously so.
[...] swear. Cohen often comes up with the wierdest arguments, by the [...]