Harbus

Issue date: 11/17/08 Section: News

President -Elect Barack Obama

A conservative Kenyan relates his personal odyssey through the 2008 election. In the process of selecting a leader, he makes surprising discoveries that transcend politics.

On the surface, it appears that I voted for Obama because I am black, or because I am Kenyan, or both. But nothing could be farther from the truth. More than any other singular event, this election forced me to confront my identity in unexpected and sometimes unsettling ways. Would I hold allegiance to a candidate based on national affinity, or would my personal and political beliefs triumph? If I could be honest, I had wanted to vote for Obama all along but my intellectual underpinnings held me back until layer after layer of bias, doubt and skepticism were peeled away paving, leading to clarity of choice of whom I should select.

I trace the seeds of my political awareness to college at a dinner I attended with my then-girlfriend and her parents who hailed from the southern Indiana. Her father asked me what my parents did for living. "Fairly innocuous question," I thought as I responded that my mother was a nurse and my father a professor. He promptly responded, "So you're a democrat." I have no idea why those particular professions should connote political party, but something within me cringed instinctively. I had been labeled solely on the basis of my parents' professions (and possibly, the color of my skin). From that day, I grew determined never to be typecast along demographic, religious or socio-economic factors.

While many college students may never be confronted as bluntly as I was about their political stances, in general, college is a place where we come of age, so to speak, and decide what we will believe about the world and how to make it a better place. We cast our votes based on who we think will do a better job and who is best aligned with our issues and ideals. At least that's the theory. In practice, most people are probably driven by one or two central issues. For me, the top issue going into the election was abortion. As a social conservative, the choice of who to elect was therefore resoundingly clear: Senator John McCain.

My identity as a social conservative and as an individual has stemmed largely from my own spiritual convictions. Faced with two compelling candidates who shared similar faith backgrounds to my own, I was forced to confront my own bias that Republicans held a monopoly on moral authority. Intellectually, I knew this not to be true but it was much easier to affiliate with a party that took a definite moral stance on the abortion issue. As I listened more and more to Obama, I came to appreciate his insightful perspective on the fundamental issues undergirding the contentious abortion debate: preventing unwanted pregnancies. I respected that he had carefully thought through the issue and understood that the bigger priority was helping solve the problem before we got to the point where we needed to make a decision on life. When Obama issued a clarion call for men to take up their responsibilities as fathers, he once and for all resonated with my own belief that restoring fatherhood to its proper place in society would yield the largest dividends. While my spiritual convictions have not changed, Obama helped to contextualize this issue in a way that most other candidates did not, allowing me to overcome my bias towards the Republican side.

Continued...

Page 1 of 3 next >

Article Tools

FRONT PAGE