"Quand un Obama en France?"

It's a topic that's come up around my host family's dinner table a few times and that I've seen scrawled in neon spray paint on the metro. Quand un Obama en France? 'When an Obama in France?'

NYTimes just published an article on the issue. As a visitor in France of all of two months, I'm not really in a position to form my own conclusions on the claims and nuances of latent racism here. But I can hear and notice the French reactions, which have been flowing freely since the Obama victory.

One black man on a metro started a tirade against the 'lazy blacks' who weren't doing their part to combat French racism. My host mom's boyfriend started talking to me about the possibility of electing a black president in France, and then got distracted by logistics: "Well, he would have to be métis (mixed race), like Obama," he said thoughtfully. "Black black, he'd never get elected. A black black president will take much longer."

(Side note, but I love when topics from my Intro to Cultural Anthropology class pop up around me in real life. The fact that Obama is always described as, well, "black black" rather than mixed race is a perfect example of the Hypo-Descent Rule in American culture, where for a person to be considered black they need only one black ancestor. In the South, this rule became known as the "one-drop rule", i.e., one drop of black blood makes you a racial minority. Contrast that to the comment above and you can see the principle going the other way, at least for one French man. Okay, excited anthropology student speech over.)

I was having this conversation with my bestie Hannah last night, that for us students who voted Obama, we weren't really all that conscious of his race: we were far more interested in his message of hope and change and his kick-ass speeches. It's a little staggering, then, to be in Paris where it's Obama-le-président-noir all over the place. Oh well. If his election changes things around the world and not just the way thing are done in the U.S., I'll be even happier with how I voted in my first presidential election.