Obama’s Nobel: The View of an Insider

The Nobel Peace Prize, the most highly regarded of global recognitions, is frequently controversial. The surprise designation of President Barack Obama as a Nobel recipient was greeted in the American media with ambivalence and even disdain. Some commentators suggested that being in office a mere nine months did not allow for an imprint on global policy or an amassing of humanitarian deeds deserving the Peace Prize. Disparaging words cascaded from the punditocracy about Obama’s pretty phrases and empty promises. The New York Times opined, “Normally the prize is presented, even controversially, for accomplishments,” and the Chicago Tribune headlined, “Europeans honor U.S. president for not being Bush.”

The left was even more strident. The distinguished historian Howard Zinn wrote, “I was dismayed when I heard Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on wars in two countries and launching military action in a third country (Pakistan), would be given a peace prize.”(1) The brilliant progressive commentator Naomi Klein cited chapter and verse describing how Obama’s government had sustained and even strengthened many Bush policies that weakened international governance.(2)

These questionings and disputes brought back memories. Twenty-four years earlier the Soviet cardiologist Eugene Chazov and I were recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which we had co-founded four years earlier.(3) Our award evoked a storm of virulent protests. For selecting us the Norwegian committee was accused of pro-Soviet partisanship in the Cold War. That was far-fetched. Norway was the most orthodox member of NATO, and its foreign policy hewed to every breeze out of Washington.

Hard Wiring of Racism in the USA

Election of a first black President evoked much wishful thinking that the US had entered a post-racial era.  It took 45 years after the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, but at last we had arrived, if not to the promised land, at least to a more equitable social order. The arrest of the distinguished Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr charged with disorderly conduct by a police officer investigating a possible break-in at the Gates home in Cambridge, Mass. An outstanding academic was being herded to a police station like a common criminal just for being black.  

As Glen Loury argued in an Op Ed in the New York Times, this is but a tempest in a teapot.(1)  Extensive media coverage of the Gates incident ignored the experience of millions of black men who are racially profiled and harassed daily by the police. Black people are frequently stopped, searched, publically demeaned and arrested.  During the past 30 years, Loury pointed out, with massive popular support, the US has enacted an extraordinarily punitive and brutal criminal justice system. Since 1980 the numbers of those arrested had quintupled; these are mostly  black and Hispanic men, who now constitute two thirds of those jailed. As of mid 2008,  about 4.8 percent of black men compared to 0.73 percent of white men are imprisoned. While whites by far exceed the use of illicit drugs, blacks are imprisoned 13 times as frequently. (2) The US is the world’s largest jailer spending three times more for jail than for  public education. The likelihood of a black child at age seven ending up in prison during a life time is one in three, while for a white child it is one in seventeen.

 Three strike drug laws target disproportionately the poorly educated, permanently unemployed, segregated inner city under class blacks. These jobless young men, hailing form dysfunctional families, gravitate to gang activity, drug trafficking and petty crime. The constantly brewing violence is largely self-directed against their own kith and kin. For the white community, the police serves as the front line to contain what is regarded as a ferocious beast. They are unwilling  to confront the  social and economic policies that  beget the evil system.