Can Obama Win In spite of his Race

Can Barack Obama Become President?
By Allan Hunt Badiner, AlterNet
Posted on March 13, 2007,
The man with an increasingly good chance of becoming America's first black president officially announced his candidacy on a cold Springfield morning just as newly deceased Anna Nicole Smith and newly shorn Brittney Spears inflicted serious competition for TV viewers.

Nevertheless Barack Obama, the 45-year-old son of Kenya and Kansas, has penetrated the media's foggy obsession with tabloid stars and has become, in short order, a celebrity himself. He has jump-started interest in the presidential race and zinged from something like 12 percent name recognition to being a close second for the Democratic nomination. With the campaign's starting gun only just fired, Obama is already perceived as a powerful threat to Hillary Clinton's well-funded political juggernaut and John Edwards' carefully planned strategies, and has emerged as the presumptive speaker for the conscience of the country in the 2008 presidential sweepstakes.

Many are excited just to be passionate again about a presidential campaign, even if it turns out be the classic brief dance of an underdog. But with lightning swiftness, an Obama nomination seems tantalizingly possible. Even sitting presidents can't always raise the $1.3 million taken in by the Obama campaign during a single fundraising event in Los Angeles on Feb. 20 sponsored by Hollywood moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen.

The field reports on Obama are also impressive: He recently addressed the largest ever pre-presidential-primary crowds in New Hampshire, Iowa, Ohio and Texas and has been endorsed by Iowa's attorney general and state treasurer -- pragmatic characters practiced at backing obvious winners in their state. The Iowa caucuses early next year will be among the nation's first electoral tests of presidential candidates. Inside the offices of MoveOn.org, there is agreement that Obama is far and away the favorite among its members and has been for the past six months. Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle has endorsed him, saying that Obama "personifies the future of Democratic leadership."

What do we know about this first-term U.S. senator who wants to be our president? The Obama resume is impressive: Harvard Law School graduate and president of the Harvard Law Review, civil rights lawyer, constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, author of two best-selling books, grass-roots organizer and Illinois senator for eight years, where his style has been described as methodical, inclusive and pragmatic. Factors such as his stalwart opposition to the Iraq war, a growing appreciation for his self-effacing charm and crossover appeal, and Americans' desire for fresh and future-focused leadership all seem to bode well for Obama's continuing momentum.

Race in the race

So now that Obama has burst on the scene as a real contender, the question becomes: Is America ready to elect a black man to its presidency?

For sure an Obama nomination would be a powerful update on the black condition in America and signal wide acceptance of the enormous diversity of its population. Yet, on the other hand there are pockets of resistance and reluctance in the African-American community to get on the Obama bandwagon. Some question Obama being the product of a mixed marriage -- his mother is white, his father from Kenya. Obama's origins were not the slave experience shared by many African-Americans, especially its senior political class. But that may not have as much impact in the rank and file, and among younger African-Americans.

Meanwhile Bill Clinton has been by far the most popular president among black voters, and Hillary Clinton has her share of their support. The initial reluctance among black voters should have been no surprise -- the Clintons have earned their close friendship with African-Americans. But as the viability of Obama's run becomes more apparent, a dramatic growth of his support in black America is to be expected.

Surely Obama's ideas and positions will play well in black communities: universal healthcare, technological improvements for poor and rural communities, reform for the political system, energy independence and ending the war in Iraq. The fact that racial minorities make up a disproportionate percentage of the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan is not lost on people of color in this country.

For many, Sen. Obama represents a modern and positive image of blackness. He is a worldly, well-educated man married to a well-educated professional black woman. Another way that the race issue may ultimately work in Obama's favor is that it helps force those who are loudly critical to base their stand on his record and positions and steer clear of personal attacks that could be construed as racist.

But what about the election? The voting booth provides ample coverage for secret racists. Yet a newly announced Gallup poll found that 94 percent of Americans would vote for their party's African-American nominee for president before their party's woman nominee. And it's safe to assume that the same people who would reject Obama on the basis of his skin color would probably reject his progressive views even if he were white.

The votes he may "lose" due to race alone are votes he would not have had anyway. With his early and impressive following among young people, some experts are predicting an unprecedented increase of eligible young voters coming to the polls to support Obama in 2008.

Other well-known figures have paved the way for Obama's run. The first black woman to be elected to Congress, Shirley Chisholm, ran for president in 1972 and established the importance of the black vote. In 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson was taken seriously as a possible presidential candidate and won more states in the 1988 primaries than anyone thought possible. Throughout the 1990s former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was riding a wave of success after the first Gulf War, was widely lauded as presidential material. Had he run in 1996, he may well have won. As with Obama, his racially mixed background was seen as a plus. Finally, in 2004 both Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton ran full-blown campaigns for president.

It is unlikely that there will be a moment during the nomination process when everyone suddenly decides that the time is right for a black president. If history is any guide, these cultural shifts take on a life of their own, and only after the fact does everyone agrees it was time.

The experience paradox

In 2008, given the disastrous state of political affairs in America and its standing in the world community, the candidates with the most Washington experience appear to be headed for trouble in some popularity surveys. Polling consistently shows that many Americans want a fresh approach, a leader who is not representative of the system that has brought us to the crisis point. "Most voters want something new," says Democratic consultant Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000. "They want less D.C. experience and more good values."

Nevertheless, Obama does have significant experience under his belt -- eight years in the Illinois state Senate and a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his first two years in the Senate. Senator Obama has been notably productive in Washington -- he's the primary sponsor of 152 bills and resolutions, including three Senate resolutions, and 14 bills that he co-sponsored have become law. He introduced the Spent Nuclear Fuel Tracking and Accountability Act, which works to deter nuclear proliferation; the Drinking Water Security Act of 2005, which reduces pollutants in our water; and the Lane Evans Veterans Health and Benefits Improvement Act of 2006, which secures health benefits for our veterans.

Obama's perspective on the topic of experience is instructive: "Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have an awful lot of experience, yet they have engineered what I think is one of the biggest foreign policy failures in our recent history. So I would say the most important things are judgment and vision ... and passion for the American people and what their hopes and dreams are." He is on record as believing that given a certain necessary level of experience, sound judgment is always more important than time on the job.

Can Hillary hold on?

Many Democrats agree that their '08 candidate should be a unifier, someone who can give voice to the issues Americans agree on and reach across independents and some Republicans for votes. Hillary Clinton, despite her high name recognition, acumen for raising money, political markers transferred from Bill and popularity among the Democratic elite, will have to prove that she is not the polarizing figure that many of rank-and-file Democrats worry about. Intelligent and articulate, she nevertheless lacks the ability to connect with people that made Bill so magnetic. To quote Bill Mahar, "She's the wrong Clinton."

Others fear that once Hillary is a candidate, Republicans will relentlessly dredge up vivid reminders of the more tawdry aspects of the Clinton presidency: the Monica Lewinsky revelations, Jennifer Flowers and the impeachment attempt. Many Americans were sympathetic to Hillary throughout that drama, but it is a fair guess that voters do not want to be reminded of it daily.

There is also a long history of Hillary being the prime target of reactionary talk show hosts throughout the American South and West, who railed on nightly about Hillary and invited listeners to call in and join in the demonization of the first lady when Bill was president. The right-wing conspiracy that Hillary decried did in fact exist, and she was their target. Although attacks on Hillary were essentially groundless, almost half of the American electorate go into this election season with a negative perception of Hillary Clinton.

Finally, Hillary's refusal to "admit she made a mistake" when voting on the Iraq war is regarded by many as a strategic blunder and stands in contrast to Obama's clarity about the need to end the occupation of Iraq quickly.

Obama on record

"I think one of the things about national politics that is so exhausting is this attempt to airbrush your life," Sen. Obama has said. "This is who I am, and this is where I've come from." Some critics have called Obama the Rorschach candidate, loved not so much for his positions but for his appealing persona. The instant rock-star status he enjoys, and the media frenzy he generates, have the downside of creating the impression that he is heavy on charm and light on ideas. Yet in his new book, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama spells out his platform in detail. His stands on the most complex and divisive issues of the day, from gay marriage to the Middle East to the death penalty, are fully explained in 384 well-written pages that the average reader can comprehend.

The book also recounts Obama's position on the Iraq war. In 2002, he strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq because he felt it was an ill-conceived venture that would "require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undermined cost with undetermined consequences." He warned that an invasion without strong international support could "drain our military, distract us from the war with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and further destabilize the Middle East." Currently, Obama takes issue with those who feel the problem was one of strategy or implementation: "I have long believed it has also been a failure of conception, and that the rationale behind the war itself was misguided." In January 2007, Sen. Obama introduced legislation that would commence redeployment of troops no later than May 1 of the same year.

But with friends like democrats...

Universal healthcare, energy independence, action on global warming, more affordable education and a phased withdrawal from Iraq all will have a clear appeal to progressives. But one should never underestimate the ability of Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

A sizable percentage of the progressive sector may not be happy with any candidate who does not agree with them on every issue. They have already shown a surprising lack of concern for the political and practical consequences of their inflexibility. The following that Dennis Kucinich, and Ralph Nader enjoyed are cases in point. Intractable liberal voters are like window shoppers who feel most comfortable going home empty-handed and later whining that they couldn't find something they liked. They may have been as responsible for reelecting Bush as his hard-core conservative base.

Has America under George W. Bush dropped into an abyss of moral and economic bankruptcy? Sadly, this is what our nation now represents to the rest of the world. Perhaps the most groundbreaking aspect of an Obama presidency would be the message it sends globally: The post-Bush era of American governance has arrived.

If candidate Obama's challenges are daunting, his overcoming those challenges would be all the more significant for many around the globe. An Obama presidency could vault him and all of us into a new era, where sane and compassionate policies are championed by a more united and rational citizenry. Still, world popularity doesn't elect U.S. presidents. Will Americans be driven primarily by their fear or their hope? The possibility of a new president named Barack Hussein Obama hangs in the balance.

Owen Sound Emancipation Celebration since 1862

The Owen Sound Emancipation Celebration Festival will be celebrating their 145th concurrent picnic/festival this summer - August 3 - August 5 in Owen Sound, Ontario.
"Individuals interested in: history, family, culture and community have been congregating every August 1st weekend since 1862 in Owen Sound, "the most northerly retreat of the Underground Railroad journey in Canada". Descendants of blacks, who came via the Underground Railroad to settle in freedom, gather to reminisce and enjoy a time of fellowship
This is an especial ceremony for all of us as we celebrate family, fellowship, oral history, documented history, community, culture and roots of our amazing integrated community. Meet historians, educators, diplomats, relatives and contributors to the freedom struggle. Enjoy the integration of congeniality, pride, inquiry, knowledge, spirit and future.

This event is acknowledged as being the longest consistently running in Grey and Bruce counties .
situated within the valley of Owen Sound resplendid with charm, warmth, camaraderie and purpose, home of the Owen Sound Salmon Spectacular and the Owen Sound Rainbow Derby, Tom Thompson, Billy Bishop, and John "Daddy" Hall (The first Black person to settle at Sydenham Village near
Owen Sound who arrived about 1843.Owen Sound's First Town Crier).

"Owen Sound" : neighbours to Hanover's Tommy Burns who fought Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope and renowned for how he stood up against prejudice which deterred his notoriety. "Owen Sound" - neighbours to Markdale's William Luke who preached at the Methodist Church (in Markdale) before leaving for Alabama to work with newly freed slaves there. In 1870, the Ku Klux Klan lynched him and six of his black students..William Luke was the only white person lynched in the Underground Railroad Movement.
The Owen Sound Emancipation Celebration Picnic commemorates the British Commonwealth Emancipation Act of August 1, 1834. Owen Sound and area residents have been celebrating this occasion since 1862 and have incorporated celebrating the United States Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. This year we will be paying homage to 200th anniversary of the March 25, 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act.

Youths views on Obama - Webtalk

Howard Dean 2.0: Obama Engages Youth on the Web
By Sam Graham-Felsen, The Nation
Posted on February 21, 2007, '
More than a week before Barack Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, 3,500 students--many of whom had driven for hours from out of state--packed into George Mason University's Johnson Center in Fairfax, Virginia, brimming with idealism. As the Senator took the stage to address the frenetic young crowd, he was visibly taken aback.


The Obama campaign had done nothing to help with the event. Students for Barack Obama, which began as a group on the social networking site Facebook, had organized every aspect of the rally, from the slick, union-printed posters to the all-student speaker lineup preceding Obama. "This was a serious campaign-level rally," said 22-year-old Adam Conner, who attended the rally and runs the RunObama.com blog, "something you expect to see towards October of an election year rather than February of an off-year."

Obama started to deliver his usual stump speech, but soon he began to address his audience directly. Crediting young people for shaping history "more often than not," from the civil rights movement to the Vietnam protests, he beckoned them to take the lead in fighting against the war in Iraq. Obama ended by recalling, as he often does, Martin Luther King Jr.'s prophecy that "the arc of the moral universe…bends towards justice." Yet as his speech reached a crescendo, there was a palpable sense that he believed, perhaps more than ever before, in his own message. "Here's the thing, young people, it doesn't bend on its own, it bends because you put your hand on that arc and you bend it in the direction of justice," Obama boomed. "Think about all the power that's represented here in all of you…. If you all grab that arc, then I have no doubt, I have absolutely no doubt, that regardless of what happens in this presidential year and regardless of what happens in this campaign, America will transform itself."

The room exploded, and if it hadn't fully registered before, Obama and his staffers understood that there was genuine potential for something like a Howard Dean 2.0 movement that could be anchored by an even younger grassroots base empowered with newer, sharper online tools.

What happened at George Mason provided physical evidence that Obama's youth following is more than a bunch of kids who clicked a button. Before the rally, Obama's campaign already knew they had a massive presence on Facebook. Students for Barack Obama (SFBO) had around 60,000 members, and even more astonishingly, a 26-year-old named Farouk Olu Aregbe had assembled more than 200,000 in his Facebook group "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)" in little more than two weeks (the group now has more than 272,000 members). According to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, the growth was "unprecedented." As a point of comparison, the Facebook group for Hillary Clinton has fewer than 4,000 students and the largest group for John Edwards has half that.

Joe Trippi, the architect of Dean's web-driven grassroots campaign in 2004, marveled at the activity: "The Obama campaign had nothing to do with it, and they're already at 250,000 people. That's amazing--the Dean campaign, it took us six months to get to 139,000 people."

Meredith Segal, a junior at Bowdoin College, started the SFBO group on Facebook in the summer of 2006, in hopes that it would serve as a petition to encourage Obama to run. Thanks largely to Facebook's "news feed" technology, which sends out automatic alerts about the activities of all of one's Facebook "friends," the word spread fast. Soon, she was being inundated with messages and e-mails from students across the country who were eager to help. Segal and others began convening conference calls, and before long, a sophisticated operation with chapters across the country, a regional leadership structure, a field team, a communications department, a finance department and a website had evolved. The group even has a student at Gallaudet University in Washington, a school for the deaf, who specifically coordinates students with disabilities. "We started as a Facebook group, but as the rally demonstrates, we're a whole lot beyond Facebook at this point," says Segal. "We're in the real world."

Agrebe's "Barack Obama (One Million Strong)" group [registration required], which is collaborating with SFBO, is also leveraging its online manpower into tangible results. Within hours of launching a fundraising initiative--with the goal of collectively raising $1 million with small donations from members--students had already given $2,000 to the Obama campaign.


While they may be running their operations like seasoned political operatives, both Agrebe and Segal are essentially new to the process. Agrebe was class president of his college, Missouri Western State, and he did some fundraising work around Hurricane Katrina relief; Segal, a neuroscience major, had been involved in community service and a bit of antiwar organizing. The Obama campaign is their first real foray into electoral politics.

The same could probably be said for much of Obama's youth following. Indeed, Obama's candidacy is stirring young people more than any other politician in recent memory.

"He has unimaginable appeal to my generation," says Brian Klaas of Carleton College, editor of the Carleton Progressive. For many 18- to 26-year-olds--who are among the most diverse and, according to numerous polls, most tolerant American generation in history--Obama's multiracial background embodies the personal and political identity of the Generation Y cohort known as "Millennials." For a politically disillusioned generation that came of age throughout the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the 2000 election debacle, 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, Obama's post-partisan rhetoric is profoundly appealing. To a civic-minded generation that engages in community service at record levels but generally doesn't vote or trust in politics as a force to change the world--Obama's past as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago resonates.

"We've got a movement--when you've got over a quarter of a million people there's no better word for it--and this is a calling," says Agrebe. "You don't expect it, but when it comes, you take the responsibility."

Young people are responding to Obama, but is he responding to them? So far, his campaign has allowed a youth-led grassroots following to sprout organically without interference. He's done little with his official Facebook site: He hasn't personalized his profile, and instead of sending youth-specific messages to potential followers, his staffers have been cutting and pasting standard campaign e-mails and speech transcripts.

But by attending the George Mason rally, Obama signaled to students that he respects their ability and power as organizers, and acknowledges what a grassroots youth movement could bring to his campaign. It's clear that Obama will have to run a nontraditional, decentralized campaign if he wants to see this kind of energy flourish. He'll have to communicate consistently and directly with students, in their medium. Blogger Matt Stoller at MyDD.com suggests Obama give concrete tasks for his youth following to accomplish. "He should say, 'We need a million new primary voters registered by July or August,' set up a tool to count new primary voters, and periodically call the people that are registering the most voters," Stoller says. "That would show real trust."

On the day Obama announced his candidacy, his campaign launched my.barackobama.com, a social networking site that allows supporters to post blogs, organize fundraising drives, create offline meetings and link up with other supporters. The appearance of my.barackobama.com indicates that the campaign is taking social networking seriously in the wake of Obama's surge on Facebook. The site and online strategy are being run by former Deaniacs, and a co-founder of Facebook has reportedly been brought on board as well. Young people are already dominating activity on the site: Of thousands of groups already formed, three of the top ten are student groups, and SFBO, the top group on the site, has nearly twice as many members as the second-largest group.


The mainstream media tends to portray the Obama youth movement as a pack of groupies, fawning over the latest rock star. But these students have shown that they're not interested in being spectators.

In a Chicago Reader interview from 1995, Barack Obama wondered, "What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer?" If Obama can show his young followers that he's still that grassroots organizer--a rock star perhaps, but one who listens to, trusts and empowers his base to come on stage and rock with him--it's going to be one hell of a show.

What we do know about Obama

Obama's Identity: Where Do We Start?
By Patricia Williams, The Nation
Posted on February 16, 2007,
I mean, you got the first sort of mainstream African-American who's articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man. -- Senator Joseph Biden, in faint but unfettered praise of Senator Barack Obama

Recently the New-York Historical Society and the Studio Museum of Harlem curated "Legacies," a fascinating show at N-YHS in which contemporary artists reflected on slavery. One of the commissioned pieces that accompanied the display was a short film by artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. It featured McCallum, who is white, and Tarry, who is black, configured as a "twinning doll" -- a nineteenth-century toy that has two heads, one at each end of a common torso. At the doll's waist is attached a long skirt or a cloak. Held vertically, the skirt falls and obscures one head. Flipped one way, it becomes a white doll. Turned upside down, the skirt falls the other way and suddenly it's a black doll. In the film, McCallum and Tarry, joined at the waist by some feat of pixilated trickery and dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, flip head over head down a long dark marble corridor, first a white head, then a black head, first a white man, then a black woman, first a Thomas Jefferson, then a Sally Hemings. As they describe it, "the races are joined head to toe ... continuously revealing and concealing one another." Such an interesting metaphor for the state of our union.

When I inquired further, McCallum told me that there was an old children's song about the dolls: "Turn you up/Turn you back./First you're white/Then you're black." I tried Googling those words in hopes of finding a recording. Instead I turned up a satirical piece by rocker Lou Reed, "I Wanna Be Black," in which a (presumably hypothetical) "I" desires "to be black" as an escape from a neurosis of whiteness. Actually, the word "white" is never used in the song. It's alluded to in the chorus -- obliquely but with crystal clarity nonetheless: "I don't wanna be a fucked-up middle-class college student any more." According to these lyrics, whiteness is a dull preserve defined by respectable class status, college education and world-class angst; black people have ever so much more fun, what with having "natural rhythm," "a big prick," a "stable of foxy whores" and "get myself shot in the spring" "like Martin Luther King."

The jolly entertainment of switching identity from white to black and back again is not the exclusive province of frat boys slumming around as pretenders to ghetto life. "Jungle parties" are still good clean fun at country clubs, at Halloween parties down at the precinct and in the unfortunate confusion that is Kevin Federline. The inverse -- switching from black to white and black again -- is more freighted. Blacks who present themselves as clean and articulate and sober and important risk being viewed as false, elitist or duplicitous. "Acting white" has all these connotations. Whites "acting black," on the other hand -- i.e., any coded masquerade of down and dirty -- tend to be read as cool or maybe disaffected or, at worst, stuck in some stage of rebellious adolescence.

Frankly, what I found most unforgivable about Senator Biden's recent remarks was his utter failure to learn from a past in which he was intimately implicated. He was, after all, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee when our spectacularly inarticulate President's father nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. As every last minority graduate of Yale -- whew, ten or fifteen at least -- came forward to weigh in about whether Thomas or Anita Hill was more believable, media forces expressed shock and awe that there were -- gasp -- just so many black people who could string a whole sentence together! Astonishing sequences of subject-verb-object! A few years later, it was Colin Powell who was perceived as shockingly articulate; then Condoleezza Rice.

The persistence of this narrative is not limited to Biden. On MSNBC's Chris Matthews Show, Matthews hosted a discussion of Obama's decision to run for President. "No history of Jim Crow, no history of anger, no history of slavery," Matthews opined. "All the bad stuff in our history ain't there with this guy." Not true, I thought. The "bad stuff in our history" rests heavily upon each and every one of us. It shapes us all, whether me, Matthews, Obama, Biden -- or Amadou Diallo, the decent, hard-working Guinean immigrant without any American racial "history," who died in a hail of bullets fired by New York City police officers because he looked like what the officers, groaning with racial "baggage," imagined to be a criminal. Some parts of our racial experience are nothing more or less than particular to our accidental location in the geography of a culture.

If, for example, I migrated to South Africa and were greeted as an exciting, exotic black American prophet (we "articulate" blacks are inescapably "exotic" when we travel abroad), I'd be no less implicated in the complexities of that country's racial struggles -- even if I were entirely ignorant of those struggles. At a more complex level, however, American identity is defined by the experience of the willing diaspora, the break by choice that is the heart of the immigrant myth. It is that narrative of chosen migration that has exiled most African-Americans from a substantial part of the American narrative -- and it is precisely his place in that narrative that makes Obama so attractive, so intriguing and yet so strange.

Obama's family history is an assemblage of elements of the American dream. His late father migrated from Kenya to the United States; his mother was from Kansas. Before him, the archetypal narrative of immigrant odyssey had been an almost exclusively white and European one. I suspect that Obama's aura stems not just from a Tiger Woods-ishly fashionable taste for "biracialism" but from the fact that he's managed to fuse the immigrant myth of meteoric upward mobility onto the figure of a black man.

Back on Chris Matthews, Cynthia Tucker, a black woman who writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, responded, "He truly does seem to transcend race because his mother, after all, let's not forget, was white." Matthews agreed: "His grandmother he went to visit in Hawaii is white. Yeah." This, to me, was a baffling exchange. Obama's mother's being white is supposedly what allows him to transcend this thing called race? He looks black but he really isn't? Is blackness really only defined by Jim Crow, anger and slavery? If American-ness, at least in this equation, is defined by patronymic immigrant hope, is racial transcendence then to be defined by maternity, relation to whiteness, biology? "Transcendence" implies rising above something, cutting through, being liberated from. What would it reveal about the hidden valuations of race if one were to invert the equation by positing that Barack Obama "transcended" whiteness because his father was black?

Senator Obama has many attractive attributes -- he's smart, a great writer and speaker, a skilled tactician, full of fresh vision, youthful, with a good-looking Kennedy-esque appeal. Yet there are many people to whom his appeal rests not on what he is but on what they imagine he isn't. He's not a whiner; he's not angry. He doesn't hate white people. He doesn't wear his hair like Al Sharpton. He is not the whole list of negatives that people like Chris Matthews or Joe Biden or a whole generation of fucked-up middle-class college students identify as "blackness." Indeed, part of the reason I am anxious about the trustworthiness of Obama's widespread appeal is this unacknowledged value placed on his ability to perform "unexpected" aspects of both whiteness (as in, proud immigrant stock) and blackness (as in, his remarkable ability to discern that the sterling fish knife is not a shoe horn).

This is not just about the dualism of black and white, of course. Obama's family raised him in diverse locales -- Hawaii, Indonesia, the world. Does the perception of his identity change if we think of him as our first Hawaiian presidential candidate? To paraphrase, is he the first mainstream Hawaiian-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy who wouldn't be caught dead in a grass skirt holding a ukulele? Or the first mainstream Indonesian-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy who had the interesting experience of going to a Roman Catholic school in a largely Muslim country, which might provide lots of useful cultural insights for a President to have in this time and place? No, unfortunately, as there are those at Fox News who can't tell a Roman Catholic school from a madrassa.

Worse yet, a lot of the analysis of Biden's comment has skimmed over his patronizing of Obama's substance. Rather, it has focused on whether the comments destroyed Biden's chances to run for President. Who, after all, even knew Biden had his hat in the ring?

But back to Senator Obama, a presidential candidate of profound decency, extraordinary smarts and great eloquence. He was president of the Harvard Law Review, a position that requires not just the highest grades in the entire universe but also the unanimous acclaim of a band of viciously competitive students and a famously divided faculty. Those who make Law Review are immediate stars, and fabulously fast-tracked. Those who have served on the Law Review include a stunning and stellar array of familiar names: Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer and Chief Justice John Roberts; Dean Acheson, Alger Hiss, Archibald MacLeish, Judge Richard Posner, Michael Chertoff and New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. It is, in the secretly assigned world of global power, an even better ticket to the top than being sealed in a coffin at Skull and Bones. It was acknowledged as such when Jews first joined the Law Review, when Democratic political pundit Susan Estrich became the first woman president of the Law Review in 1976 and when Obama became its first black president. It is a position whose credentializing power has never been questioned as far as anyone knows -- at least till a few weeks ago, when the New York Times published an article in which Ron Klain, informal adviser to Biden's presidential bid, wondered if being president of the Law Review really and truly required the same skill set as being President of the United States. As a cabdriver recently expressed it to me: "Maybe the mirage in the desert is no more than a benchmark constantly being moved out of reach." (He too was articulate, and quite poetic, that cabbie. Made me wonder what benchmarks had been moved beyond his reach to leave him ferrying me around at midnight.)

Of course, the crown of the Law Review presidency is not the only aspect of Senator Obama's "authenticity" that's being refigured as a mess of thorns. If no one doubts his blackness when it comes to the uniqueness of his accomplishments while on the Law Review, he's apparently not "black enough" in other contexts. In another article in the Times, perpetual contrarians like Stanley Crouch, Debra Dickerson and Carol Swain were quoted as questioning whether he truly was a brother beneath the skin. It is surely ironic that Obama -- one of the very few Americans of any stripe who has actual first-degree relatives in Africa -- is being figured in some quarters as an imposter of African-American-ness.

At the same time, Obama's identity reveals the complex blindness and slipperiness of American conceptions of race, culture and ethnicity. There's a lovely quote from Saidiya Hartman's remarkable new book Lose Your Mother: As she wends her way through Ghana on a Fulbright Fellowship, she notes, "I was the stranger in the village, a wandering seed bereft of the possibility of taking root. Behind my back people whispered, dua ho mmire: a mushroom that grows on the tree has no deep soil. Everyone avoided the word 'slave,' but we all knew who was who. As a 'slave baby,' I represented what most chose to avoid: the catastrophe that was our past ... and what was forbidden to discuss: the matter of someone's origins."

As I read Hartman's words, I wondered how familiar that sentiment felt to me, or to the many African-Americans -- whether they've never left our shores or traveled the world -- so relentlessly in search of "home." I wondered how familiar that passage must feel to recent arrivals to our peculiarly dubbed "homeland." Just today I met a Swedish woman who is phenotypically "Asian." When she was a student at the University of California, she went to the hospital with stomach pains -- and was almost committed as insane before she ever got to see a doctor, because the administrative gatekeepers simply could not reconcile her appearance with her assertion that she was a Swedish citizen.

And in this moment of unprecedented diaspora, I wonder how familiar all these sentiments must feel to Barack Obama just now. Flipped endlessly down a hall of mirrored images of blackness and whiteness, he is no less celebrated than Frederick Douglass was as one whose entire identity is mired in the exhausted exceptionalism of the "surprisingly" hyperarticulate African phenotype; yet simultaneously embraced as one who has transcended the embodiment of a troublesome past and emerged on the other side -- bright as a newly minted coin, "cleansed" of baggage, of roots, of the unacknowledged rupture that is, paradoxically, our greatest national bond.

Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University and a member of the State Bar of California, writes The Nation column "Diary of a Mad Law Professor."

A Black History Month Sermon

Black By Popular Demand

By Sean Gonsalves, AlterNet. Posted February 19, 2007.



How can a group of people who had their power stripped from them for so long still have so much strength? Tools
EMAIL
PRINT
5 COMMENTS
Share and save this story:


Also in Top Stories

The Big Corporate Motherhood Conspiracy
Janina Stajic, AlterNet

Rove Said to Have Received Iranian Proposal in 2003
Gareth Porter, IPS News

Is It Good that Big Businesses Are Going Green?
Jason Mark, Kevin Danaher, Grist Magazine

Mercenaries are in the Military to Stay: Get Used to It!
Lorelei Kelly, AlterNet

Why All Tax Credits Should Be Refundable
David Morris, AlterNet

More stories by Sean Gonsalves

Main AlterNet RSS Feed

Get AlterNet in
your mailbox!
Advertisement
I wrote a column for Black History Month in 2001. Every year around this time, longtime readers of this column ask about getting a copy of the column or a recording of the actual sermon described in the piece.

So, once again, for Black History Month 2007, it's black by popular demand -- a remembrance of one of the best sermons I've been blessed to hear.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago was the guest preacher at Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, Calif. He began by reading a portion of the Samson and Delilah story as recorded in the Book of Judges. He ended his reading with Delilah's question: What makes you so strong? Then, he flipped the question on his African-American audience: What makes you so strong, black man?

How is it that after 200 years of slavery, in which skin color was the determining factor of your servitude and social status, you could still produce a Frederick Douglass, a Booker T. Washington and a W.E.B. DuBois? What makes you so strong, black man?

How is it that after losing millions of souls crossing the Atlantic on slave ships, losing your name, language and cultural identity, you could still produce a Benjamin Banneker, a Louis Armstrong, a Duke Ellington, a Paul Robeson and a Jackie Robinson? What makes you so strong, black man?

How is it that after two centuries of being someone else's property and another century of Jim Crow laws, lynchings and daily insults, you could still produce a Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, a Malcolm X, a Howard Thurman and a labor leader like A. Philip Randolph? What makes you so strong, black man?

How is it that even though for years they had a law making it illegal to teach blacks how to read, you could still produce a Langston Hughes, a Ralph Ellison, a Richard Wright and a James Baldwin? What makes you so strong?

How is it that after having your intelligence and moral worth devalued and degraded by some of the leading intellectuals of modern scholarship, you could still produce a noted pediatric surgeon like Ben Carson, a mathematician like Bob Moses and an inventor like Lewis Latimer?

How is it that after being considered inferior by leaders of Western civilization, including the man who signed the Emancipation Proclamation, you could still produce a Joe Louis, a Muhammed Ali, a Hank Aaron, a Michael Jordan and a Jesse Owens, who told Hitler to stick it in his ear by winning four gold medals in Germany?

And what makes you so strong, black woman? How is it that after 300 years of being used -- used as a toy for the slave master, as a punching bag by your own men, you could still produce a Harriet Tubman, a Sojourner Truth, a Fannie Lou Hamer, a Rosa Parks and early 20th-century millionaire Madame C.J. Walker? What makes you so strong, black woman?

How is it that after being inculcated with the idea that your skin color is ugly, your hair nappy, your lips too big and your hips too wide, that the less you look like a blonde beauty, the worse off you are, you could still produce a Josephine Baker, an Angela Bassett, a Jane Kennedy and a Pam Grier? What makes you so strong?

How is it that after being walked on and walked out on, after being portrayed as a sexless Aunt Jemima and an oversexed temptress, you could still produce a Toni Morrison, a Zora Neale Hurston, a Maya Angelou and an Oprah Winfrey?

How is it that after men, even your own men, told you were good only for housekeeping and making babies, you could still produce an educator like Mary McLeod Bethune? What makes you so strong, black woman?

How is it that after being cast as lazy welfare queens, you could still produce a sculptor like Meta Warrick Fuller and a Dr. Jane Cooke Wright, whose research led to treating cancer patients with chemotherapy and who later became the first black woman to be named associate dean of a medical school in America?

What is the source of this incredible human strength and resilience that turns victims into victors?
______________
Thank you, black America, for the many marvelous things you have contributed to this great nation, and for reminding us of the paradoxical power of the powerless.

What makes the Black so strong? It is the human spirit that no man can tamper with. Try as he might to suffocate the light that the Creator has placed in every human mind and spirit, that light that seeks freedom of expression and upliftment, independence - it cannot be blown out with cruelty, exploitation or slavery of the body.

Obama is Black enough for Black Women of the World

Obama Wouldn't Be First Black President
By Aysha Hussain


© DiversityInc 2007 ® All rights reserved.


You've seen the headlines: "Are Americans Ready for a Black President?" "Is Obama Black Enough?" "Obama: America's First Black President?"



Ever since the nation first met Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in 2004, his race has been called into question more times than Michael Jackson's. Obama is clearly a black man, but is this really a breakthrough? Some blacks say Obama isn't "black enough," which seems ironic because for many blacks, former President Bill Clinton was "black enough." In 2001, Clinton was honored as the nation's "first black president" at the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Annual Awards Dinner in Washington, D.C.



Were there other "black" presidents? Some historians have reason to believe people don't really understand the genealogy of past U.S. Presidents. Research shows at least five U.S. presidents had black ancestors and Thomas Jefferson, the nation's third president, was considered the first black president, according to historian Leroy Vaughn, author of Black People and Their Place in World History.



Vaughn's research shows Jefferson was not the only former black U.S. president. Who were the others? Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. But why was this unknown? How were they elected president? All five of these presidents never acknowledged their black ancestry.



Jefferson, who served two terms between 1801 and 1809, was described as the "son of a half-breed Indian squaw and a Virginia mulatto father," as stated in Vaughn's findings. Jefferson also was said to have destroyed all documentation attached to his mother, even going to extremes to seize letters written by his mother to other people.



President Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh president, was in office between 1829 and 1837. Vaughn cites an article written in The Virginia Magazine of History that Jackson was the son of an Irish woman who married a black man. The magazine also stated that Jackson's oldest brother had been sold as a slave.



Lincoln, the nation's 16th president, served between 1861 and 1865. Lincoln was said to have been the illegitimate son of an African man, according to Leroy's findings. Lincoln had very dark skin and coarse hair and his mother allegedly came from an Ethiopian tribe. His heritage fueled so much controversy that Lincoln was nicknamed "Abraham Africanus the First" by his opponents.



President Warren Harding, the 29th president, in office between 1921 and 1923, apparently never denied his ancestry. According to Vaughn, William Chancellor, a professor of economics and politics at Wooster College in Ohio, wrote a book on the Harding family genealogy. Evidently, Harding had black ancestors between both sets of parents. Chancellor also said that Harding attended Iberia College, a school founded to educate fugitive slaves.

Coolidge, the nation's 30th president, served between 1923 and 1929 and supposedly was proud of his heritage. He claimed his mother was dark because of mixed Indian ancestry. Coolidge's mother's maiden name was "Moor" and in Europe the name "Moor" was given to all blacks just as "Negro" was used in America. It later was concluded that Coolidge was part black.

The only difference between Obama and these former presidents is that none of their family histories were fully acknowledged by others. Even though Obama is half-white, he strongly resembles his Kenyan father. And not only is Obama open about his ancestry, most people acknowledge him as a black man, which is why people will identify Obama, if elected, as the first black president of the United States.

Obama Is Clear you Can See

Obama Is the Best BS Artist Since Bill Clinton

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted February 14, 2007.

The "talent of the century" hits the campaign trail, and while it isn't clear who Obama really is, he's certainly helping make it clear who the bad candidates are.

Last Friday night a friend called and told me that Barack Obama had posted a sort of pre-announcement of the start of his presidential campaign on his website. I immediately cued it up and within ten minutes was writing a column blasting him for ripping off half of his campaign speech from a smorgasbord of '04 Democratic candidates -- then stopped when I realized that I'd already written exactly that column about Hillary Clinton's kickoff speech a few weeks ago.

So I went back and watched the speech again, and I actually felt chills run up my spine. A few weeks ago, Hillary Clinton's launch speech ripped off John Kerry and the DLC with its "Let's have a conversation" theme; Obama, meanwhile, went the Howard Dean route, nicking "A campaign to take America back" from Dean and RFK Jr., among others. The fact that Hillary, like Kerry, is set up as the DLC-acolyte candidate while Obama, like Dean, is set up as the antiwar candidate suggests a kind of permanent template for the Democratic primary process. Maybe soon the race for the Democratic primary will be like Everytown USA's annual high school production of A Streetcar Named Desire, where every year they find a new antiwar Blanche and a new pro-corporate Stanley. The faces are different, the lines are the same.

I've been on the fence about Obama for more than two years now, ever since his breakout performance at the Democratic convention in '04. When I saw that speech -- an iconic piece of inspired nonsense/political showmanship, one that set flashbulbs popping like Michael Jordan's virtuoso 1988 dunk contest performance -- I knew right away that he would be the Democratic presidential nominee someday, perhaps even in the next election cycle.

When I mentioned this to my friends, they told me I was crazy. Obama had had absolutely no national experience at that time, he was a political virgin, there was no way he was ready for prime time. My answer to that was, compared to what? Throw a guy who can speak like that against the list of likely Democratic candidates in 2008 -- a sorry collection of human saline drips that included Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd -- and Obama could fucking walk to the nomination, even if he chose a page from the Betty Crocker cookbook as his stump speech.

Fast forward two years and that appears to be exactly what Obama has done. The Illinois Senator is the ultimate modern media creature -- he's a good-looking, youthful, smooth-talking, buttery-warm personality with an aw-shucks demeanor who exudes a seemingly impenetrable air of Harvard-crafted moral neutrality. If Hillary Clinton even dares to open her mouth within a hundred feet of him at any time during the campaign, she's going to come off like a pig digging for truffles. Even Edwards -- the so-called "slick" candidate from '04 -- sounds like a two-bit suburban Buick dealer next to Obama. You get past the "issues," and it's a wipeout.

Obama knows this, and so his entire political persona is an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man without race, ideology, geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp edges of any kind. You can't run against him on the issues because you can't even find him on the ideological spectrum. Obama's "Man for all seasons" act is so perfect in its particulars that just about anyone can find a bit of himself somewhere in the candidate's background, whether in his genes or his upbringing. You can be white, you can be black, you can be Christian, you can be Muslim, you can be from the American heartland or from Africa... you can even, according to his book The Audacity of Hope, worship Norse Gods or bury your relatives according to Hawaiian rituals:


In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites ...

As far as political positioning goes, his strategy seems to be to appear as a sort of ideological Universalist, one who spends a great deal of rhetorical energy showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view, and conversely emphasizes that when he does take hard positions on issues, he often does so reluctantly. He is a black man from Chicago who gets away with praising Ronald Reagan, which is not an easy task. His political ideal is basically a rehash of the Blair-Clinton "third way" deal, an amalgam of Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton and the New Deal; he is aiming for the middle of the middle of the middle.

In short, Obama is a creature perfectly in tune with the awesome corporate strivings of Hollywood, Madison avenue and the Beltway -- he tries, and often succeeds, at selling a politics of seeking out the very center of where we already are, to the very couch where we've been sitting all this time, as an exciting, revolutionary journey into the unknown. And while most of what he says and writes is basically some version of the same old tired clichés about family and faith and hope and optimism and "working together" and "getting involved," he adds to those clichés real literary flair, wordsmithing far beyond the range of most politicians. Take this bit about his kids in his book:


... I sat at the dinner table, watching Malia and Sasha as they laughed and bickered and resisted their string beans before their mother chased them up the stairs and to their baths. Alone in the kitchen washing the dishes, I imagined my two girls growing up, and I felt the ache that every parent must feel at one time or another, that desire to snatch up each moment of your child's presence and never let go -- to preserve every gesture, to lock in for all eternity the sight of their curls or the feel of their fingers clasped around yours.
Here's the thing about Obama, the reason they call him a "natural" and a "rare talent." When Hillary Clinton spouts a cliché, it's four words long, she's reading it off a teleprompter, and it hits the ear like the fat part of a wooden oar. Even when Hillary announced she was running for president, she sounded like she was ordering coffee. Obama on the other hand can close his eyes and the clichés just pour out of his mouth in huge polysyllabic paragraphs, like Rachmaninoff improvisations. In this sense he's exactly like Bill Clinton, who had the same gift. He is exactly what is meant by the term bullshit artist.

My usual instinct when presented with this type of Zelig-esque, Eddie Haskell, non-stick personality is to violently reject it. But over the course of the last few weeks I've found myself increasingly amused by the Obama phenomenon. For one thing, he clearly pisses off Hillary to no end. Same with Biden and all of those other windbag jerk-off assholes in that revolting "national security Democrats" clan in the Senate. There is something subtly racist (in Biden's case, not so subtle) in the way these more entrenched Democrats are riding Obama's lack of credentials and acting like the '08 nomination is their birthright, like he hasn't "waited his turn" or something, paid his dues. As if any of these clowns would wait ten seconds to declare for the White House if they had the same odds that Obama has now.

I have no idea who Obama really is, but he is against the war now (and at least never voted for it) and he seems to infuriate the right people. He has people bitching now that he's not black enough, and there are obviously going to be plenty of people for whom he's too black. And both of those groups of people, frankly, deserve whatever's coming to them. So for the time being I'm going to enjoy his rise to the top, the same way I enjoyed reading The Red and The Black -- like another great phony, Julien Sorel, Obama is a perfect mirror of the society he was born to conquer, and his journey upward throws everyone he passes into stark, humorous relief. Whether I'll vote for him is another story. But he's certainly helping make it clear who shouldn't get my vote.