David Reynolds, summing up the impact of the election of Barack Obama at the end of the Radio 4 series, Empire of Liberty
“The land of liberty, rooted in bondage” was another of his great phrases
This has been a really good series (in contrast to the new Americana, which I find curiously unformed & unsatisfactory, definitely no substitute for Alistair Cookes Letter)
I have been listening to the Friday night omnibus edition. Reynolds is a great master of the material, the language & the story. Magisterial almost, even though you do not always agree with his interpretation
He dealt well with the new realisation that to be Black in America is not necessarily the same as being 100% of slave descent, though the idea that this kind of multiculturalism is new is an odd one – how did people such as Tiger Woods or Colin Powell get to be ¼ this or ⅛ that if the mixing did not start several generations ago?
This American conviction has had consequences of unexpected kinds. There was a paper in Nature about the Out of Africa theory which looked at, among others, the DNA of Black Americans for support of the hypothesis. The authors argued, ludicrously, that any admixture of non-African blood would not affect the results because it would have come from the (slave owning) paternal line, while the study looked only at maternal (mitochondrial) DNA
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