President Obama's visit to Ghana this month was downright biblical.
I don't say this because of the adoring African crowds that treated the American president's visit as if it were the Second Coming. Nor because I believe that our first African American commander in chief will somehow deliver the continent from the evils that confront it. But the scene of Obama and his family at the site of one of the most notorious slave stations on the Ghanaian coast -- ominously called the Door of No Return -- reminded me of that singular vision from the Gospels about the last becoming the first.
Of course, Obama's own ancestral relationship to slavery can be found on the white rather than the black side of his family tree. His Kenyan father arrived in America after receiving a prestigious scholarship rather than by being sold into slavery. Six generations ago, however, an ancestor on his maternal side was a slave owner in Kentucky.
But the first lady does directly descend from African slaves, and therefore she and the Obama children are wholly part of the legacy of slavery. And to see them ponder the historical significance of the Door of No Return -- a place where tens of thousands of shackled men and women were transported from dungeons to the hulls of sailing ships -- as representatives of the most powerful office on Earth was profound.
Generally perceived as the symbol of an overdog nation, U.S. presidents are rarely seen in the position of directly empathizing with the victims of history. (And when they do, it's generally in the pose of vengeful warrior, such as in the days after Pearl Harbor or 9/11.) Calling the visit a "moving experience," Obama refrained from the linear moral logic of latter-day crusaders. He did not merely condemn slavery and the wrongs that went with it. In fact, by calling the Door of No Return "the portal through which the diaspora began," he embraced it -- and all its horrors -- as a sort of birthplace.
"As African Americans," he said, "there is a special sense that on the one hand this place was a place of profound sadness, but on the other hand, it is here where the journey of much of the African American experience began."
