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Obama isn't white, black enough for racialist US

[ Posted On: 2007-02-18 ]

For those of us born black just after the Second World War, we had front row seats for the collapse of American apartheid. We started out confined to all black communities and schools at a time when skin colour was still destiny.

But as segregation gave way, many of us were vaulted out of this sequestered world and into colleges, jobs and walks of life that had been closed to us since the nation’s founding. The rush of upward mobility produced the inevitable identity crisis, which in turn led to endless discussions about the meaning of blackness in a world where skin colour was beginning to matter less and less.

At their best, the discussions, held in college dorm rooms at night, were probing, serious and heartfelt. At their worst, they turned into lectures by the race police, 1960s’-era ideologues who characterised blackness not as a matter of individual interpretation or choice, but as a narrow set of attitudes and experiences said to make up authentic black identity.

Back then, black Americans from successful, suburban and upwardly mobile families were regularly dismissed as white or inauthentic. The authentic black experience, it was said, was limited to the hard-core and impoverished upbringing that black people often chose to brag about, even when they had actually grown up with private prep schools in the lap of luxury.

The race police ran rampant in the black community, but were rarely heard of in the white world. But they have been parading up and down Main Street since Senator Barack Obama of Illinois — the son of a black African father and a white American mother — made it clear that he intended to seek the Democratic presidential nomination.

The arguments about Obama’s blackness — or lack of it — seem positively antique at a time when Americans are moving away from the view that ancestry is a demographic fact to a view that dispenses with traditional boundaries.

Even so, the complaints about Obama provide an opportunity to examine the passing of the old and the rise of the new. The claim that he is not black because his mother is white carries little weight under either system.

It makes no sense to young Americans who checked more than one box when identifying themselves by race in the last census. They subscribe to a fluid notion of race and seem perfectly willing to let people describe themselves racially any way they choose.

Nor does the charge make sense in the black community. It has historically and eagerly embraced as black anyone and everyone with any African ancestry to speak of. That embrace often included interracial families, who lived in black communities long before they were accepted elsewhere. It included even blue-eyed, sandy-haired people such as civil rights leader Walter White, whose black ancestry was imperceptible to the naked eye.

The carpet bagging black Republican Alan Keyes opened up the racialist can of worms when he opposed Obama in the Illinois Senate race in 2004. Badly outmatched and reaching for any brick he could find, Keyes blurted out that Obama was not black because he was not descended from slaves.

The Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch later seemed to second that view, saying Obama had not "lived the life of a black American." The slavery heritage is, of course, central to African-American life. But that is a fairly recent recognition for many of us who grew up black in the second half of the 20th century.

Black families like mine dealt with the stigma and humiliation of slavery by simply suppressing it. My older uncles, for example, grew up in regular contact with relatives born into slavery, but never mentioned it to me. Silence about slavery at home was matched by neglect of the topic at school.

As a result, I was nearly 40 years old and writing a book about my family when I stumbled upon the news of my enslaved relatives in a newsletter from a small historical society.

The claim that Obama has not lived the typical African-American life is closer to the nub of what bothers his black traditionalist critics. Their complaint goes 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.
Obama missed out on that part when growing up as an introspective child, longing for his missing father in Hawaii and Indonesia. He stumbled onto the mysteries of race in his own 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 organiser in an infamous public housing project before discovering his vocation as a politician.

His critics are at least right when they describe his journey as a departure from the customary stereotype. But they get it fundamentally wrong when they argue that the journey described in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, is incompatible with blackness.

The hue and cry over Obama’s identity stems from black traditionalists’ failure to recognise multi-racial versions of themselves. Soon, perhaps by year’s end, the Obama story, which seems so exotic to people now, will have found its place among the other stories of the sprawling Black Diaspora.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Sylvia Wairimu Kang’ara is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, US

| View Profile & All Articles By: Sylvia Wairimu Kang’ara |

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