From Prospect Magazine:
Let me confess to a pinprick of irritation at the emergence of Barack Obama as the first truly credible non-white candidate for president of the US. To begin with, there’s the problem of wearily having to answer my white friends’ plaintive question each time a significant black figure shoots across the American firmament: “Why can’t we have a British Obama (or Martin Luther King or Malcolm X or Oprah Winfrey)?” The implied challenge to black Britons in public life is: why can’t you be more like him/her?
The answer is simple. At a personal level, few people are as charismatic, capable and ruthless as this mixed-race political phenomenon. And anyone can do the maths: the black British population is proportionately one sixth the size of the black US population, so it’s hardly surprising that black Britons don’t produce the same range of talents.
But there’s history too. British whites don’t carry the stain of transatlantic slavery in the personal way that US whites do, and as a result race—specifically anti-black racism—does not play the same part in our story. Black Britons can’t bring centuries of white guilt to bear with the devastating impact that African-Americans have done for two generations. For the most part, we have been here for less than 60 years. British whites distanced themselves from the historic crime that still torments America long before we arrived. Few Britons ever owned slaves here; the blood remained on hands thousands of miles away. Britain’s black population is probably better compared to some of the less successful Latino communities of the US southwest.
More here.