Crouch on Obama: not black enough
New York Daily News - November 2, 2006
What Obama isn’t: black like me [by Stanley Crouch]
If Barack Obama makes it all the way to becoming the Democratic
nominee for President in 2008, a feat he says he may attempt, a much
more complex understanding of the difference between color and ethnic
identity will be upon us for the very first time.
Back in 2004, Alan Keyes made this point quite often. Keyes was the
black Republican carpetbagger chosen by the elephants to run against
Obama for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. The choice of Keyes was
either a Republican version of affirmative action or an example of
just how dumb the party believes black voters to be, since it was
obvious that Keyes came from the Southeast, not the Midwest.
That race was never much of a contest, but one fascinating subplot
was how Keyes was unable to draw a meaningful distinction between
himself as a black American and Obama as an African-American. After
all, Obama’s mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black
Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not - does not - share a heritage
with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of
plantation slaves.
Of course, the idea that one would be a better or a worse
representative of black Americans depending upon his or her culture
or ethnic group is clearly absurd. Even slavery itself initially came
under fire from white Christians - the first of whom to separate
themselves from the institution were Quakers. The majority of the
Union troops were white, and so were those who have brought about the
most important civil rights legislation.
Why then do we still have such a simple-minded conception of black
and white - and how does it color the way we see Obama? The naive
ideas coming out of Pan-Africanism are at the root of the confusion.
When Pan-African ideas began to take shape in the 19th century, all
black people, regardless of where in the world they lived, suffered
and shared a common body of injustices. Europe, after all, had
colonized much of the black world, and the United States had enslaved
people of African descent for nearly 250 years.
Suffice it to say: This is no longer the case.
So when black Americans refer to Obama as “one of us,” I do not know
what they are talking about. In his new book, “The Audacity of Hope,”
Obama makes it clear that, while he has experienced some light
versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those
problems as his own - nor has he lived the life of a black American.
Will this matter in the end? Probably not. Obama is being greeted
with the same kind of public affection that Colin Powell had when he
seemed ready to knock Bill Clinton out of the Oval Office. For many
reasons, most of them personal, Powell did not become the first black
American to be a serious presidential contender.
I doubt Obama will share Powell’s fate, but if he throws his hat in
the ring, he will have to run as the son of a white woman and an
African immigrant. If we then end up with him as our first black
President, he will have come into the White House through a side door
- which might, at this point, be the only one that’s open.
Stanley Crouch is a columnist, novelist, essayist, critic and
television commentator. He has served since 1987 as an artistic
consultant at Lincoln Center and is a co-founder of the department
known as Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 1993, he received both the Jean
Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a
MacArthur Foundation grant. He is now working on a biography of
Charlie Parker.