By Janet Singleton

Islamic activist Irshad Manji, on her titular web site, subtitled “For Muslim Reform and Moral Courage,” recently wrote: “ . . .a number of students at New York University (said) they supported Obama because he’s Black. As I questioned them further, students explained that they wanted to right a historic wrong by ensuring that the land of opportunity would finally have an African-American President.”

Manji and her web site are all about truth-telling and challenging comfortable assumptions. Still, I imagine she does not want to play handmaiden to the racist right. However, that particular bit of eye-catching authenticity about a limited number of Obama voters muscles up the mythology that claims the President rode into the White House on the back of his blackness when, on the contrary, he won despite being the dark horse.

What about Party Affiliation?

Those Manji spoke to may have been Democrats in the first place, particularly any African-American students. For compelling historical reasons dating back to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (the First Lady who also was a civil rights activist), more often than not, we vote along party lines. A black person on a Republican ticket is about as appealing to me as a delectable-looking cinnamon roll tossed in a field of cow manure. I have always joked that I would not even vote for myself if I ran as a Republican

My Democratic friends say they would not have supported a worthy but tainted Colin Powell had he run on the Republican ticket when there was talk of it in the 90s. Almost certainly Arkansas-bred Bill Clinton would have taken the black vote from Powell without even trying.

Would I have voted for a Republican version of Obama molded by entitlement as an out-of-touch hawkish rich guy who graduated at the bottom of his class, thought $250,000 yearly constituted a middle-class salary, had a reputedly volatile temper, and who ditched wife number one and brought in a newer brand to be number two? No. Would I have voted for him if he had the cruel soullessness to pick as his running mate a flamboyant imbecile, whose underage daughter got knocked up by a drug dealer’s son? No. Would I have voted for him if this voluntary nitwit running mate had been a heartbeat away from a president over 70 with a bad health history and perhaps not that many heartbeats left? No. Would I have voted for him if he simply were a horse’s ass of a lesser shade of pale? Hell no. McCain and company were outclassed and outwitted, not out-Negroed.

Obama Rode through the Eye of the Needle

Other African Americans, as socialists, Independents, Democrats, Republicans, and a under a slew of affiliations, have made failed bids for the White House. Either the time was not right, they were not right, or both. Obama’s win was an example of preparation meeting opportunity and merging exquisitely to slide through the eye of the needle.

Classically, I never thought I would live to see the day an African American was at the helm of this country. I never thought the twenty-first century would live to see the day. I voted for the President, however, because of who he is, not what he is.

Two years before he ran, I read his book Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, a work that revealed him as the rare person who understood the nuances, contradictions, and complexities of race in America and around the world. And he seemed to possess an inherent, not a put-on, respect and empathy for women.

“Education is Close to His Heart”

Another sentiment not faked by Obama is his passion for implementing school reform. “Education is close to his heart,” writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. Before, people who appeared to be the products, themselves, of three generations of American’s underperforming school systems seemed to getting wackier and wackier as they worsened the mess that they were hired to straighten out. Educational reform meant only an equivalent of an ear-pulling contest among the Three Stooges. Obama pushes realistic funding, incentive-based higher pay for teachers, and the necessary medicine of an extended school year.

I feel that lack of education is the root of many evils, from crime to ethnic intolerance to plain old human devil’s-workshop mischief, to voting for a multi-millionaire presidential candidate because he’s perceived as an “average” Joe a guy could sit down and have a beer with.

Another reason why I voted for Barack Obama is Michelle Obama. Partly, I judge a man by his wife, because no matter what a man says about himself, the wife he chooses says everything about him. McCain’s wife Cindy is a kindly, but shaky-looking woman with an admitted prescription drug problem in the paste. (Could that have been because she had to put up with a pill of a spouse?) The First Lady, on the other hand, is a phenomenally intelligent, self-assured and appears to like herself. A man cannot like women if he is married to a woman who does not like herself.

Childrearing Counts

And I agree with what I have read about the Obamas’ childrearing philosophy (anybody who doesn’t think how we treat children is important needs to ask prison inmates about their lovely childhoods). In an interview with People, Mrs. Obama said their girls—Malia, 11, and Sasha, 8— are limited in television viewing to Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. “Because you just never know.”

To me that is not the voice of an overprotective parent but an expression of

not-common-enough common sense. Commercial TV is a no-child zone. Regardless of the time of day or night, shows and ads routinely feature moments that a generation ago would have been the fare of R-rated movies. As I do, the Obamas believe in a woman’s right to choose and a child’s right to be innocent.

If someone had told me a few years ago that soon there would be a couple of any color sleeping in the White House master bedroom whose views dovetailed with mine, I would have said, “Honey, your dealer deserves a promotion.”

Manji understandably, with her best efforts, may not be able to completely comprehend this transcendent moment in United States history. She grew up on the most liberal, enlightened piece of real estate in North America—Canada, where despite a history of discriminating against the French, the populace elected their first French-Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, in 1968, and since two other Franco-Canadians and a female, Kim Campbell, have held their land’s highest office.

Canada is not the US

According to Manji’s informative book, The Trouble with Islam, after emigrating from Uganda at four, she and her family arrived in British Columbia. Her adoring writings about the Western democracy give the impression that she may see the US and Canada as identical, when the only things about the two nations that are identical are the shopping malls.

Perhaps therein lurks the disconnection. Her views about American race relations seem unwisely influenced by remembrances of the restrictions of extremist Islam juxtaposed against the politically generous landscape of Canada. And that may distort the messages of an intelligent reformer into the naive themes of the overly grateful immigrant: Gee wiz, you folks just don’t know how good you’ve got it here. What are you complaining for?

Yes, I have noticed that this is not Idi Amin’s Uganda, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Khomeini’s Iran, nor any number of other turbo jacked-up situations. I’m real perceptive that way. I do indeed know what we have here—the wonderful, the outrageous, and the excruciating. And I have four hundred years of history held in the black American collective soul to remind me everyday.

My Color and My Kind

So my voting for President Obama was hardly reflexive. For at least a year, I silently brooded about his safety, the likelihood that he would be blamed for mistakes not his, and the possibility of any number of disasters.

Since I was 18 I have voted for every white male Presidential candidate the Democrats have pitched at me. Though I have grown to respect a couple, like Jimmy Carter, more than others, I cast my ballots primarily in self-defense and because people had died so that I might have the right. If John Brown could go to the gallows the least I could do was go to the polls. Yes, it made me happy that candidate 2008 was black, brilliant, and empathic, and I won’t apologize for that.

R&B performer Beyoncé, who sang at an inaugural ball, put it well when she said, “He makes me want to be smarter.”

For me to have the opportunity to vote for the sort of person, as president of my nation, that I would aspire to be is even more miraculous than the racial breakthrough it represented. No Irshad, I voted for the President not because he is my color but because he is my kind, if only in my aspirations.

Janet Singleton is an award-winning freelance journalist and novelist.