Barack's blackness: color vs. experience

This question of blackness, which has arisen in the wake of Sen. Barack Obama’s meteoric rise to fame and the brink of power, wasn’t supposed to be part of the script. When the first black candidate ran for U.S. president, most of us presumed, the question would center on whether he or she would be white enough for whites, not black enough for blacks.

The debate over Obama, mostly within the black community, illustrates simultaneously how deeply the country’s long history of slavery and racism bleeds into our contemporary politics; how far we’ve come from the days of open hatred and legal segregation; and how far we all yet have to go.

It’s also led to some strange, and strained, moments. One television interviewer, characterizing Obama’s life, postulated that at one point the senator had made the choice to be black. The assertion was greeted with mild incredulity after which Obama assured the interviewer that in the United States one with dark skin and African-American features has little choice in the matter.

If that is the case, then how can that same person not be “black” or “black enough” in the eyes of the African-American community?

To some, the debate may seem unnecessarily contentious at a time when, at least we might wish to believe, skin color is diminishing in significance when it comes to taking advantage of opportunity.

But the discussion has less to do with skin color or the fact that Obama is the child of a white mother and a black African father than it does with his experience and the fact that he did not live the traditional life of an African-American whose ancestors were slaves and who understood from birth the inequities and inherent violence of American racism.

As Debra J. Dickerson wrote in Salon.com back in January: “ ‘Black,’ in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves.” She distinguished between descendants of slaves and “voluntary” immigrants from Africa.

The distress in the black community also has to do with how whites are reacting to Obama.

“Whites,” she writes, “are engaged in a paroxysm of self-congratulation; he’s the equivalent of Stephen Colbert’s ‘black friend.’ Swooning over nice, safe Obama means you aren’t a racist. I honestly can’t look without feeling pity, and indeed mercy, at whites’ need for absolution.”

That last may be its own bit of projection onto people who, beyond skin tone, see someone remarkably accomplished, intelligent, competent and -- God knows we’re starved for this -- articulate.

Race, however, can be blinding, or at least obstructive, from either side of the divide.

Nor does homogeneity exist about this question among blacks.

Brent Staples, writing in the Feb. 11 New York Times, said the complaint about Obama’s not being the child of involuntary immigrants “goes right back to the race police of the 1960s who decreed that the only authentic black experience was one that featured hardship and crushing encounters with racism, preferably with an urban American backdrop.”

“Mr. Obama missed out on that part while growing up an introspective child, longing for his missing father, in Hawaii and Indonesia. He stumbled onto the mysteries of race in his own good time and pursued them in his own way. His quest took him to an impoverished community on the South Side of Chicago, where he worked as an organizer in an infamous public housing project before discovering his vocation as a politician.”

Staples disputes those who maintain that Obama’s journey “is somehow incompatible with blackness.”

The argument on all sides, of course, establishes the fact that race still matters and that it is a divisive force, even if within one of the races. At the same time, it becomes apparent, when one considers that Obama’s chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, is currently polling far higher than he is among blacks, that the African-American community can be both colorblind and loyal. Former President Bill Clinton understood and accommodated the interests of African-Americans, and they’re not about to quickly abandon his wife’s campaign.

The community shows itself more politically sophisticated and far less predictable than many might have presumed, a point Obama himself makes when explaining the polls.

Finally, the debate is valuable for the entire country because redeeming the culture from its long and brutal nightmare of slavery and segregation involves, we are finding out, a protracted and complex journey. The steps sometimes present themselves in unexpected ways.

National Catholic Reporter, February 23, 2007