Is Obama 'Black Enough'?
By Yoji Cole
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.