It was not merely necessary that Barack Obama become the President of the United States, it was vital that he become so through popular mandate. Politics succumbs to tokenism far too often; witness the rival presidential candidate, John McCain, choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate simply because she’s a woman. Tokenism is the cynical acknowledgement that symbols matter as much if not more than substance. It might be all right to have an African American as Secretary of State, thus showing to the world that America respects its minority community, but it is hard to imagine turning this into a genuinely empowering move for African Americans. Tokenism could have encouraged Americans to have Obama as the first mate instead of the Captain of the ship. He could have waited in the wings while another white American made his way to the top. But this time America has chosen to say no to both prejudice and tokenism.

So Barack Obama is now the President Elect of the United States, a momentous event in the history of the world. Americans, especially young Americans, have shown that they are capable of respecting their diversity in a manner hardly visible anywhere else in the world. More importantly, Barack Obama has become a symbol of unity. He has surged ahead as a true statesman, one who transcends divisive markers of identity like race, religion or ethnicity, to lead a heterogeneous group of people. He has spoken time and again of change, but it isn’t change for merely the African-Americans but for the entire nation. In his campaign, he didn’t appeal to ‘his community’ to come out and support him. He appealed to all of America. In his victory speech, he reminded people once more that he did not believe in pandering to any particular class of people, that he was everyone’s president. The people have showed that that’s what they wanted, a man who understood how tired they were of being typecast, as anti-abortionists, gays, born-again Christians, neo-conservatives, blacks, whites, liberals, and bring them together as Americans, sharing their common humanity. Perhaps that’s idealism stretched too far, but what is Humanism but idealism that seeks to unify all human beings under the banner of their common humanity?

Is Obama a Humanist? Certainly he is religious, a church going Christian who was willing to stick his neck out for his pastor. But so far he hasn’t allowed his religion to come in the way of his politics. And, as his speech on religion and politics reproduced below shows, he has consistently made allowance for both diversity and belief in secular laws. He is a rationalist who has never worn his religion on his sleeve, or tried to thrust it down the throat of the unwilling. It is this tolerance for the other that Humanism celebrates and welcomes.

The world today is haunted by intolerance and division. The West has to own up to its share of culpability in this state of affairs. It is no less guilty than the Islamic world in encouraging the politics of identity on a global scale. The Church has managed to woo most political leaders into believing that the world is essentially divided, and the only way to make “our” world more secure is by encouraging this divisiveness. Perhaps Mr. Obama will take the lead in proving that the Church, as much as the mullahs, is wrong in this as well. The United States might just, for a change, lead the world from the front in uniting humanity. Someday other nations too might think of treating all their citizens, irrespective of caste, race, sex or religion, as equals. Sceptics will declare that Barack Obama’s victory does not signify that America has overcome its traditional intolerance towards its largest minority group. Certainly that would be a miracle. But on the other hand, it has made that great leap of imagination of according leadership to a man who, traditionally, belongs to the ‘other’. How many of us can do that? And isn’t it high time we tried?

Sangeeta Mall is Editor, IHN