Stanley Crouch: Why Obama isn't black like me
By Stanley Crouch -
Published 12:00 am PST Saturday, November 4, 2006
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B7
If Barack Obama makes it all the way to becoming the Democratic candidate for president in 2008, a feat he says he might 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 in Illinois for a U.S. Senate seat. 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 very obvious that Keyes came from the Southeast, not the Midwest.
Keyes lost to Obama by a wide margin. Perhaps one of the reasons was that Keyes might get so hopped up and hysterical about religious issues that he could appall even a conservative audience with his self-righteousness until he was savagely booed away from the microphone.
Keyes was not able to make a distinction between himself as a black American and Obama as an African American. After all, Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock, and his father is a black Kenyan. Other than color, Obama did not share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves.
Of course, black Americans were obviously involved in bringing slavery to an end, but the peculiar institution initially came under fire from white Christians -- the first of whom to officially stand tall and separate themselves from slavery were Quakers. The majority of the Union troops were white, and so were those who have brought about the most important civil-rights legislation.
So why, with slavery having ended for good in 1865 with the loss of the redneck South to the Union Army, do we still have such a simple-minded conception of black and white? It seems to me that the naive ideas coming out of Pan-Africanism are at the root of the confusion.
Quite clearly -- and understandably -- when Pan-African ideas began to form in the 19th century, they were based in serious complaint. All black people suffered and shared a common body of injustices, regardless of where they lived in the world. Europe had colonized much of the black world in order to get control of its natural resources, and the United States had enslaved people of African descent for nearly 250 years. After American slavery ended, there was the time of long-suffering under segregation and bigotry, appearing in either hard or soft form.
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 much clearer than he did when running against Keyes that he has experienced some light versions of the many negative assumptions based on his color, but he cannot claim those problems as his own, nor has he lived the life of a black American. That should not actually matter.
I doubt Obama will crash and burn as Colin Powell did when he seemed ready to knock Bill Clinton out of the Oval Office. But if Obama throws his hat in the ring, he will be running as the son of a white woman who married an African immigrant. So, if we end up with him as our first black president, he will have come into the White House through a side door, which might be the only one available at this point.
About the writer:
- Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. His column routinely appears on Saturday in The Bee and occasionally on other days. Reach him at scrouch@edit.nydailynews.com. Distributed by King Features Syndicate Inc.
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