MY FIRST three thoughts upon hearing that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize were:
■ For what!?!?
■ So this is how low our image sunk under President Bush?
■ This is our Nobel!
Even the most fervent Obama supporters have to scratch their heads. The Nobel Committee praised Obama’s “extraordinary efforts’’ on international diplomacy and cooperation, citing his nascent efforts to reduce nuclear weapons and America’s “more constructive role’’ on climate change. The committee said Obama had become “the world’s leading spokesman’’ for international policies the committee has sought to “stimulate’’ for 108 years.
Talk about giving ultimate meaning to Obama’s original campaign slogan of “Hope.’’ Nobel nominations were due Feb. 1, less than two weeks after Obama took office. He has indeed been a far better spokesman for America these last 8 1/2 months than George W. Bush was for his entire eight years, but he knows he is nowhere yet in the same league as imprisoned and assassinated human rights leaders or even Jimmy Carter for years of post-presidency peacemaking.
Obama acknowledged that yesterday by saying, “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize - men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.’’
Since there is nothing concrete about Obama’s accomplishments in office - like dismantling apartheid or pulling down the curtain of communism - what this particular award is really about is America’s power to inspire, or depress, the world. Anyone who traveled abroad during Bush’s presidency knows that power.
Where Bush did right, as he did on his Africa AIDS initiative, he remains a hero to the doctors I met this year in Uganda. But mostly, from the Swiss Alps to Canadian universities and from German homes to Caribbean beaches, good friends and total strangers gave me earfuls of anger over American policies.
By the time of the 2008 presidential campaign, foreigners I met often sounded more desperate to get rid of the Republicans than American Democrats did. On the night Obama was elected, my youngest son told me from Germany and my wife told me from South Africa that people honked car horns in the wee hours for our new president. There just is no other nation that is looked to for leadership like the United States.
That gets to you and me. Obama would not have been in position to receive the Nobel Peace Prize had not Americans at a critical level made peace - or called an unprecedented truce - with its racist past. Our history is rooted so deep in slavery and segregation that terrible vestiges among the masses are still with us today in poor public schooling and disproportionate unemployment of black men.
But slowly over these last three decades, individual people of color have risen to positions of power. Election by election, corporate board by corporate board, individual transaction by individual transaction, sports coaching promotion by sports coaching promotion, Americans became better at judging individuals by content instead of color. Combine that with the national depression caused by the Bush years, whether over the economy, Iraq, or Hurricane Katrina, and the nation was ripe to take the very leap of courage that the Nobel often awards.
The Nobel Committee clearly was awarding Obama the Nobel for hauling America out of the pits of unilateralism. What had to come first was America fulfilling a major portion of the dream of another Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Martin Luther King Jr. For that, America is worthy. The Nobel Committee in fact might have made a mistake. It said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.’’
It would have been better off proclaiming, “The Norwegian Nobel Committee awards its 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to the United States of America for having the courage to come full circle 233 years after a slave-owning nation declared independence by saying all men are created equal.’’
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com. 
