Is Obama 'Black Enough'?

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Even before Barack Obama announced his candidacy, the media marveled at his rock-star status, a moniker heaped on public personalities when crowds gather in the thousands to see or hear them. For Obama, those crowds have mostly been white.

At first I thought Obama's crowds were mostly white because black America was collectively reserving its excitement for fear that whites would be turned off if too much of Obama's support was from blacks. After listening to black columnists, politicians, ministers and everyday black people question Obama's "blackness," however, I'm dismayed to hear how many in the nation's black community question his allegiance based mostly on his education and lack of a direct link to the civil-rights era or an inner-city background.

"Other than color, Obama did not - does not - share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves," wrote Stanley Crouch in his New York Daily News column.

How troubling. I remember a time when black America's tent was wide open because America's "one drop" rule huddled the nation's caramel-skinned to dark-skinned people, basically any person with one drop of African blood, under that big top. "What to racist whites was a stain of impurity became a badge of pride," writes Orlando Patterson in Time magazine. Patterson adds that black America welcomed leaders who were immigrants themselves or whose parents where immigrants, such as W.E.B. DuBois, whose father was Haitian; Jamaican Marcus Garvey, one of the most influential black leaders of the early 20th century; or others, such as Malcolm X, Shirley Chisholm, Stokely Carmichael, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, all of whom were either immigrants or whose parents were immigrants.

Black leaders today must be more than civil-rights leaders or black Horatio Alger characters. The diversity of the nation requires that, and while some black Americans question his blackness, other black Americans and immigrant Americans see his ability to unite the nation.

African-American voters wonder why white America loves him so much, said Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell, a Princeton University professor who has followed Obama's political ascent, in an NBC Nightly News report.

Obama, whose black father was from Kenya and whose white mother was from Kansas, has dealt with such questions before. Recent public challenges came from black Republican Alan Keyes, whom the GOP recruited to run against Obama for the U.S. Senate seat for Illinois. Obama won. But the fact that the GOP put Keyes against Obama says everything about race's place in American politics--it's like moths to a light. Keyes, who is from the southeastern United States, was sent to Illinois to run against Obama. With no connections to Chicago, it appeared the move was for no other reason than that Keyes is black.

When black voters say they are not card-carrying Obama supporters, they're saying they're not going to be duped by a black candidate simply because he or she is black. Reports like NBC's and candidates like Keyes indicate white America suspects that to be the case. And when the discussion is framed as "is he black enough," that's angering.

Such questions crop up because of Obama's education and because he wasn't reared in an inner-city. It's as though once a black person enrolls in college or university, especially Harvard Law School, they lose all connection to blackness.

Actually, Obama built his political career by rooting himself in the black community. In 1983, not long after resigning from a high-powered financial consultant's post in Manhattan, he moved to Chicago as a $10,000-a-year organizer for the Calumet Community Religious Conference. There he visited barbershops and cruised the main thoroughfares in a used car, getting a feel for Chicago's South Side. He left Chicago to attend Harvard Law School. After graduating, he returned to head a statewide voter-registration effort before joining a small civil-rights law firm. In 1996, he was elected to the Illinois Senate from a mostly black South Side district, and he and his wife, Michelle, another black lawyer, were married at the predominantly black Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Now that he is officially a candidate for the presidency, Obama will continue to attract an inordinate amount of attention. That attention is affording him the opportunity to not only define his candidacy but also redefine what it is to be a black man in the nation's collective mind. From his platform, Obama will broaden the black-American male's image to include leadership, education, insight, fortitude and a host of other positive attributes.

Those attributes will undoubtedly attract many voters who are not white or black to Obama, who is many different things to many different Americans. Obama's challenge is to show voters why casting a ballot for him is in their best interest because he is not running for president of white America or black America, but of the United States of America. And, if elected, Obama will have to answer to more than white voters and black voters--also to Latino voters, recent immigrant voters, East Indian voters, Vietnamese voters, Chinese voters, Christian voters, Muslim voters, gay voters, lesbian voters and myriad different types of voters. So Obama, as a person of mixed racial heritage and mixed cultural heritage, is the perfect candidate.

And not all blacks question Obama's blackness. In Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, blacks who were asked about his candidacy mainly expressed excitement, reported The Washington Post in January. Browsing through Afrocentric Book Store, Nathan Unger, 63, stopped to say that he wants Obama to run although he harbors few illusions about how much Obama would be able to focus on the concerns of black voters.

"Even if we get 30 percent from Obama, we're not going to get that from anybody else," Unger said. "From white folks, we might get 10 percent. What I worry about is that we might want too much from him. It's not just about us out here; it's about everybody."

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