I've been struck but the number of column inches devoted to whether the Sen. Barack Obama is "black enough" or "authentically" black. Eugene Robinson reported in yesterday's Washington Post that black South Carolinians seemed unconfused on the topic. Along with U.S. Rep James Clyburn, who kindly spoke in my class on African-American Politics years ago when I taught at USC, former South Carolina House Leader Gilda Cobb-Hunter was happy to vouch that Obama is African American even if she wasn't quite ready to endorse him just yet:
Meanwhile, Courtland Milloy thinks that all of the time spent obsessing over this questions shows how far we still have to go. In the meantime, he got a straight answer from a waiter at the Obama fundraiser on which he was reporting:"People talk as if this is, like, some kind of option for him," Cobb-Hunter said. "When Obama looks in the mirror in the morning, what do you think he sees? There is no way that he has any confusion about being a man of color. I think this issue is being manufactured by people who want to get us off focus. I don't hear the national media questioning Hillary Clinton about being a woman."
But what about the argument, posed by a couple of contrarian black columnists, that since Obama is not the descendant of slaves (white mother from America, black father from Kenya), he's a different kind of African American? "As time passes, very few people are going be able to say they marched in the civil rights movement," Cobb-Hunter said. "Are the people asking this question saying that if you didn't live through the Civil War, you can't understand slavery?"
Marcus Smith was working as a waiter at a Democratic fundraiser here the other night when Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) took to the podium. Smith, with dishes in both hands, stopped to listen. "I'd really like to see Obama become the first black president of the United States," he said later. Asked what made Obama black, he replied, "That little taste his father gave him was all it takes."I suspect the main people questioning Obama's black credentials are people who are think that his major failure as a black man is that he didn't kow-tow enough to them or their agenda and that bludgeoning him with the racial stick might change that. An observant politician might notice that ignoring these sorts of people only caused Bill Clinton to soar higher in the polls in 1992 and did not prevent him from being acclaimed America's first black president by Toni Morrison. Obama would be wise to do the same.
Of course, Obama came to national attention with his soaring rhetoric at the 2004 Democratic Convention about bringing this divided nation together. Accordingly, What the World Needs Now seems to fit Obama's ideas and politics perfectly. Moreover, it a song that is "black enough" (whatever that means) to be sung by Dionne Warwick and Ruben Studdard, and "white enough" (whatever that means) to be sung by Clay Aiken.
