PING!
Posted on 02/14/2007 12:37:36 PM PST by GMMAC
The blackness of Barack Obama
Andrew Coyne, National Post
Published: Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Barack Obama's campaign for president has barely begun, and already the questions are mounting. Is he experienced enough? Is he tough enough? And, bizarrely, is he black enough?
In the pages of the Washington Post, on Salon.com, on 60 Minutes and Meet the Press, debate is boiling furiously, mostly among black opinion leaders. Sometimes it is as crude as his parentage, born to a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother: Is the glass half-black or half white? In part it is something vaguer, more cultural: that as a Harvard-educated lawyer who grew up in places like Hawaii and Indonesia, he has little affinity with the problems of inner-city blacks.
Usually it is an amalgam of the two: that neither his ancestry nor his experience connect him to the legacy of slavery, still the touchstone of racial politics in America. Al Sharpton, as usual, was bluntest. "Just because you're our colour doesn't make you our kind," the veteran racebaiter warned recently.
It's a pointless debate, by and large: black voters, for whose benefit the arguments for and aganst Mr. Obama's blackness are supposedly being advanced, will decide for themselves whether and on what terms they will support him. Still, it's fascinating that the issue should have arisen, and if it is pointless, it's useful to know why it's pointless. One of the things Mr. Obama's candidacy may achieve is to confirm, not the irrelevance of race as a political issue, but the incoherence of it -- the maddening, irresolvable undefinability of it.
Take the cultural component first of all. This is hardly the first time that a black politician has been accused of "acting white" because of the way he speaks, dresses or carries himself, nor is the charge reserved to those in public life. When Bill Cosby famously complained that gangsta rappers were the "new minstrel shows," performing a cartoonish stereotype of the threatening black male that was every bit as offensive in its way as the shuffling golliwogs of the past, was he confronting an uncomfortable truth about the uses of racism, even among its victims? Or was he, as his critics charged, simply holding blacks up to a white, middle-class mirror? Was he, in effect, a self-hating black, while the gangstas, with their invocations of pimps, drug-dealing and other aspects of street life, were the true standard-bearers of racial pride?
The same debate erupts wherever identity politics come into play. Was Margaret Thatcher's election as prime minister of Britain a great step forward for women? Or was she, as more than one feminist has sniffed, just "a man in a skirt," conservative politics being but a synonym for male values? Is gay marriage an important equality right? Or is it a sellout to "straight" values, an implied rebuke to the promiscuity that some gay theorists celebrate as part of homosexual culture? Should you wear a cochlear implant if you're deaf ? Or are you just trying to "act hearing"?
But you're no further ahead if you retreat into genealogy. The New York Times ran an interesting article the other day on the growing trend among American blacks to refuse to identify as such on the census form, on the grounds that the very concept of belonging to "a race" was rooted in disturbing notions of racial purity. Mr. Obama's racial heritage is questioned because he has a white mother. But for census purposes, the "one drop" rule was historically the norm: you counted as black if any of your forebears were. (And what made them black? Presumably the same.) As offensive as that sounds, any other rule would be just as arbitrary. How black is black? One-half ? One-quarter? Seven-eighths?
Probe a little further, and you come to the same conclusion that modern genetics has: that race, as a means of categorizing human beings, doesn't exist. There are obviously differences in skin colour and other physical features. But the boundary lines between putative racial groups are so blurred, the distinctions so trivial in the overall genetic picture, that it is scarcely useful to speak of it.
And yet we continue to organize our thinking in this way. By coincidence, the day after the Times piece appeared, the Globe ran a story on blacks in France demanding to have their race included in the census, as a recognition of their different experience of French life. Here in Canada, we maintain a separate legal status for those of a particular genetic background, on the basis of treaties signed by their ancestors. Those treaty rights have been inherited, not by all of the original signatories' descendants, but only some of them: the ones who kept the racial bloodline pure.
Even as we are counting chromosomes, we refuse to recognize that is in fact what we are doing. When the NDP government of Ontario under Bob Rae wanted to bring in "employment equity" -- hiring quotas -- for racial minorities, they faced a daunting practical problem: how to define membership in the preferred groups? Rather than test for skin hues and kinkiness of hair, they instead asked applicants to "self-identify."
In policy terms, it was nonsense. For Barack Obama, it is probably enough: if you feel black, you are.
Ac@andrewcoyne.com
© National Post 2007
PING!
Not one word about his character or his politics, huh?
Obama is a disgrace and a fraud! His white mother brought him up while his black father hit the road. The man is neither black nor white. He should be ashamed of himself for first disrespecting his mother, and secondly becoming no diffferent than the likes of Jackson, Sharpton, Duke and all the other disgusting race pimps of such caliber.
Drop him off at 125th street in Harlem and he'd be more out of place there than Joe Biden.
Who says 'acting white' has to do with being Caucasian or even originated exclusively with 'white' people? If that's all Al Sharpton can hold up against Bill Cosby's criticism, Sharpton is in automatic self discreditation mode.
Its my contention that to even ask the question locates you squarely in the Democratic Party, the party of race obsession.
If you inquire about his positions on defense, tax policy, the constitutional role of government in America, its a fair chance you're a Republican. If you agonize over his ethnicity, its dead-bang certain you're a Dem.
Obama is definitely a liberal, but how is he a "race pimp"?
Boy is that the truth.. Al spoke the truth...
What kind are you Al Sharpton?..
The answer could freak out everybody even the darkies..
Which does not include many many BLACK PEOPLE.. that are NOT black at all..
Many that are as white as they are black.. like Obama..
Parasites of affirmative action..
I feel blue.
;^)
Osama Obama has giant chip on his shoulder. Many so-called black people who are of "mixed race" grow up feeling a need to prove to other blacks that they are one of them. Some are subjected to insults from black kids that they are not really black. To prove their blackness they adopt radical black nationalist views and express contempt for "white America." Louis Farrakhan for example, claims that white people are spawns of the devil, yet he is partly white. You could make a long list of famous black nationalists who are of mixed racial makeup.
I hate to admit it, but Obama is articulate that is unless he is putting on phony accent as he did for his announcement.
Sounds like the Libs want to re-instate the paper bag rule.
In the Federal Government, ethnicity is determined by the individual. If an individual believes that they have native American or some other minority ancestry, they simply fill out a form and are identified as such.
Barack is no Abe Lincoln, either.
It's apparent that he would have said, in 1861, "Civil Wars are dumb. If the South wants Fort Sumter, let them keep it."
About time.
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