Is Obama the worlds first minority Chief Executive?
Great answers folks, thanks. Jaltoch…your question is probably more interesting than my original one. Mine was more of a black & white (pun intended) kind of query, very binary. Yours introduces a more interesting, qualitative element to it. In general, what I seem to recall reading was that while several other nations had elected women chief executives, none had elected one from a racial minority. Clearly my recollection was wrong, they may have couched it with “a historically oppressed minority in a nation where voting rights are not granted based on race, ethnicity, class, religion, etc.” I really don’t remember, but it must have been something like that. (And quite honestly, I’m a little embarassed that I didn’t even think about the South African example. I guess it’s because I wasn’t equating their prior voting system to that which we have in the US.
Brandman, I was just watching a clip of Juan Williams from Fox News that Salon linked to. He made a point along those lines, but the nuances are probably important. He’d just made the point that American blacks had been disenfranchised until 1965, and said that he couldn’t think of another example where a country elected a leader from formerly despised minority. Even in that context, he might be wrong, but not as blatantly.
