I was talking to some friends about which would have been more significant: Barack Obama becoming President as a Black man or Hilary Clinton becoming President because she is a woman.
I suggested that a Black Man winning the election was more significant because women have been elected in many other countries before, while it is hard to think of too many nations that have chosen a man or woman from a minority racial group.
If we collected all the countries that had women as leaders, we’d have a huge list. How many countries have elected leaders who are not from the majority race?
I’ll start with the obvious:
Barack Obama from the United States. He’s Black and the majority race in America is White.
Probably not really what you were going for, but South Africa (before the ANC). I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more examples of a minority in power as a result of oppression than the case with Obama.
I am wondering if Nelson Mandela would qualify as “minority”.
Although 77% of South Africans are “Black” (meaning of Bantu descent), they are traditionally divided among a number of large “tribes” (for lack of a better term) including the Zulu, the amaXhosa, the Tswana, etc. Mandela’s ancestry traces to a cadet branch of the Thembu subgroup of the amaXhosa, who comprise only 5.3 million of South Africa’s ca. 45 million population. What he did, though, was to unite Black South Africans in the African National Congress, and successfully combat apartheid and the white minority regime. In a quite real sense his accomplishments parallel Washington’s in taking people from Massachusetts, Virginia, etc., and making them see themselves as Americans, not just citizens of their state. This is probably too debatable for GQ, but the bare fact is an accomplishment worth noting.
India currently has a female president (Pratibha Patil) and a Sikh prime minister (Manmohan Singh). I believe they used to have a Dhalit (Untouchable) PM, but could be mistaken.
Fiji’s former Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry, an ethnic Indian, served from 1999-2001. A coup in 2000 led by ethnic Fijian George Speight contributed to the brevity of his term. Indians account for about a third of the population.
Which doesn’t really matter, since most “blacks” in America have a significant amount of white ancestry. The only difference in Obama’s case is that his white ancestry is more recent, and it was consensual.
Another British P.M., John Major, is almost sort of kind of half-American. His father was born in the U.K. but spent most of his childhood in the U.S.:
