Africa is a Country

For me, the significant achievement is not that, as a black man, he became president. It is that, as a certain kind of outsider American—of which the Kenyan father, Indonesian school, and biracial origin, not to mention the three non-Anglo names, are markers—he was able to work his way into the very center of American life. In other words, Obama is an avatar of a new American story, not one having to do with slave ships, nor one relying on the Mayflower, nor even the wave of poor Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants that the country welcomed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Obama story is the story of immigration in the age of air travel, the kind of Americanism that issues from exchange students and H1B visas and lapsed work permits. This is a form of being American that has been invisible in plain sight. His victory, I would think, should resonate even more strongly with these out-of-place characters who have been toiling in the shadows of the American story: the graduate students with funny accents, the pizza-delivery guys with no papers, Americans, regardless of color, who remember a time when they were not Americans.

Teju Cole.