Barack Obama isn’t black!?

Published February 2nd, 2007

This morning there’s a New York Times story that says that Obama may have trouble carrying the African-American vote. Apparently there is a perception that Obama just isn’t “black enough”.

And at the Shepherd Park Barber Shop here, where the hair clippers hummed and the television blared, Calvin Lanier summed up the simmering ambivalence. Mr. Lanier pointed to Mr. Obama’s heritage — he is the American-born son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — and the fact that he did not embody the experiences of most African-Americans whose ancestors endured slavery, segregation and the bitter struggle for civil rights.
“When you think of a president, you think of an American,” said Mr. Lanier, a 58-year-old barber who is still considering whether to support Mr. Obama. “We’ve been taught that a president should come from right here, born, raised, bred, fed in America. To go outside and bring somebody in from another nationality, now that doesn’t feel right to some people.”

This is a view of ignorance.

Yes, Barack Obama was born to a Kenyan father and a white mother. His parents met in Hawaii. So far, sounds American enough to me. Barack lived in Hawaii until he was age 6, when his mother (divorced and remarried, to a Indonesian man) and him moved to Jakarta. He stayed there until age 10. At age 10, he moved back to Hawaii (last I checked, an American state) and stayed there until he left for college in California. So Obama has lived in the United States from birth to age 6, and then from age 10 until today. How is that not “an American”? Can someone explain that to me?

In the quote above, Mr. Lanier says that Obama can’t understand the struggle for civil rights. Why not? Yes he grew up in a white family, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have to endure racism and prejudice. Last time I checked, bigots and racists didn’t interview you on your background and heritage. They just insult and slur you based on the color of your skin. Obama was born, raised for the most part, and fed here in America. Kobe Bryant, whose “blackness” is unquestioned, spent much of his life in Italy. But no one considers him a foreigner. Obama grew up as black as any African-American who has grown up in the US. A “true” African-American boy of Obama’s age would have had no special knowledge of the civil rights fight. It seems to me that being multi-racial is an even further handicap, since neither whites nor blacks are willing to claim Obama as “one of their own”. And that’s just sad.

Mr. Obama describes himself as an African-American, and as a young man, he has said, he yearned to be accepted by black Americans.

Mr. Obama declined to be interviewed, but in his memoir, published in 1995, he acknowledged being dogged by “the constant, crippling fear that I didn’t belong somehow, that unless I dodged and hid and pretended to be something I wasn’t, I would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment.”

Not surprising.

“I’ve got nothing but love for the brother, but we don’t have anything in common,” said Ms. [black author and essayist Debra J.] Dickerson, who wrote recently about Mr. Obama in Salon, the online magazine. “His father was African. His mother was a white woman. He grew up with white grandparents.

“Now, I’m willing to adopt him,” Ms. Dickerson continued. “He married black. He acts black. But there’s a lot of distance between black Africans and African-Americans.”

What? You’re willing to adopt him? How magnanimous of you. Please - he’s an American. He’s a black American. He’s a black African-American, not a black African. He didn’t grow up in Africa! The man would be a foreigner in his father’s country of Kenya. Ms. Dickerson is stripping Obama of any heritage whatsoever. The man is an American. He was born in America. He has spent the vast majority of his life in America, and has had dark skin the whole time. In order to be President of the US, you have to have been born here or been born to US Citizens. If Obama was truly a foreigner, he would be completely unable to even run for President. Do people not realize this?

On one final note:

Several leaders of the civil rights era had immigrant roots, including Stokely Carmichael, who was born in Trinidad; and Shirley Chisholm, the former presidential candidate and the first black woman to be elected to Congress. Her father was born in Guyana and her mother in Barbados.

Foreigners not only can understand the struggle for civil rights in this country, they were an integral force in the struggle. But that doesn’t even apply to Obama - he is an American.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. I am white, after all. But it just seems to me that Obama is getting a raw deal. I don’t know who I’m voting for yet, this is not an endorsement. But Obama should be given a fair shake - not shunned because of ignorance.

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