In 2008, America elected Barack Hussein Obama, a racial minority, President. African-Americans make up 13% of America’s population.

In 2014, Romania elected Klaus Werner Iohannis, an ethnic German, President. Romanians of German descent make up less than 1% of Romania’s population.

I asked my two classes of American Studies students if they thought the election in 2014 and re-election in 2019 of Iohannis marked as big a leap forward in Romania as Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories symbolized for millions of Americans, including me. They nodded yes in unison and several talked about how Iohannis’ German ancestry was used against him, especially in the election of 2014.

President Iohannis is the first ethnic minority to be elected President of Romania. Iohannis is also a protestant (a member of the German-speaking Lutheran Church) in a country that is 80% Eastern Orthodox. As I was thinking about how I am connected to two countries that broke with tradition in exceptional ways, I remembered the Luther College Alumni tour to Ireland and Northern Ireland Rebecca and I led last fall. And another tradition-breaking politician popped into my head.

In 2017, Ireland’s first gay Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Leo Varadkar, assumed office. Varadkar’s Hindu father was born in India, Catholic mother in Ireland where Varadkar was raised a Catholic.

I have lived or traveled in three countries this past year, with each collectively deciding to break with the past in ways I consider signs of progress. Race in America, ethnic identity in Romania, and sexual orientation in Ireland are no longer insurmountable obstacles to rising to the top of politics and other professions in each country. This is a better world in so many ways than the world I was born into in 1949. Some things that were considered impossible have now become reality. Racism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia are still with us, but with less-lasting force and mostly in defensive, backs-against-the-wall postures.

Of course, not everyone thinks the Obama, Iohannis and Varadkar stories are good news stories. What some call progress never comes without a struggle and there is always the possibility of backlash. That is the central argument of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. She writes about how when slavery, America’s first racial caste system, ends in 1865 it is followed two decades later by the imposition of Jim Crow laws across the American south. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 end Jim Crow, America declares a war on drugs, a new ‘Jim Crow caste system’ that disproportionately incarcerates African Americans.

Is the election of Donald Trump in 2016 another form of backlash against the two terms of America’s first African-American president? What do you think? It is a question my Romanian students and I will talk about in our next on-line class session. There is no simple answer and I am interested in what you think.