He is a star by any yardstick. He seems to be the best thing in raising black political consciousness to another level. He exudes confidence that is lacking in some of our black leaders, and his reach across the American divide could be called the real rainbow coalition than that name connotes. Yet, a major debate continues to rage amongst so-called black intelligentsia, especially amongst some black journalists, as to the authenticity of Senator Barack Obama’s blackness, especially given some poll figures showing Obama trailing Senator Hillary Clinton amongst potential black voters, which in itself would seem an oddity.
We should remember that Senator Barack (Hussein) Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to an African father (Barack Hussein Obama, Sr.) from the Luo ethnic group in Kenya, and to a white mother, Ann Dunham) from Wichita, Kansas, in the United States. When Obama was two years old, his father left the mother and proceeded to Harvard University to pursue a Ph.D., which he didn’t complete instead returning to Kenya. Eventually, the couple officially divorced when Obama was six years ago.
Now, it has been drowned on her heads and consciousness that if you have one percent black blood in you, then automatically you are black. But in Barack Obama’s case, he exceeds that percentage, actually achieving a 50% or even more as Obama writes in his memoir, “Dreams of My Father,” that his father was pitched black. What could be more black than that?
It therefore comes as a big surprise when certain cretins of African-American writers and personalities continually question the authenticity of Barack Obama’s blackness. This man has demonstrated beyond any doubt a shining example of what an outstanding Blackman should be. In 1983, Obama graduated from Columbia University in New York, then secured employment as an consultant at the Business International Corporation, where he was making more money than the job subsequently secured when he quit and relocated to Chicago, Illinois, to become a community organizer. He left in 1988 to enter Harvard Law School, where he eventually became the Editor/President of the Harvard Law Review, the first black man to have achieved that post in the then 104 year history of Harvard University. Apart from this, he also graduated magna cum laude. With this type of achievement, anybody with half a brain could see how he would have been courted by the best law firms in the country. But Obama chose to return to Chicago to continue to serve the indigent community in Chicago. When measured against some of the so-called Black leaders, it would be interesting to know what a lot of them have done for the average black man.
It was during the 2004 senatorial elections in Illinois that the “not-black-enough-like-me” and not “plantation slave descendant” began to surface, when the Republican Party drafted the carpetbagger, Ambassador Alan Keyes, to become a challenger to Obama. From the word go Mr. Keyes thought he could wean the black vote away from Obama with his vitriolic attacks in which he consistently tried to make the distinction that though they were both from the same race, they were not from the same heritage. In an interview with well-known radio personality, Steve Malzberg, Keyes had this to say: “. . . Barack Obama and I are of the same race, but we are not of the same heritage. And there is a distinction. Race is something physical. Heritage is something that may have an element that is physical or biological, but that also includes other elements of history and experience--the kinds of things that have helped to shape the mind and heart of an individual and that are not determined by physics and biology. And we are of different heritages. I’m of a slave heritage, and he is not. I have wrestled all my life with the reality of the injustices done to my ancestors, and it has been deeply important to me. It’s influenced fundamental choices that I have made in life, things I take seriously, things I am still, to this day, preoccupied with, like the question of justice and liberty. So, I think it makes a tremendous difference, and if we just look at it with racial blinders on, we will miss the fact that these are two people of the same race, but they are not two people of the same heritage.”
Of course, Alan Keyes was disgraced by the voters in Illinois when Barack Obama won the elections with over 70% of the vote, in an election year in which Republican were taking seats away from Democrats.
Another one of those black neo-cons that the Republican Party always call on to do their dirty attacks on progressive black leaders is Stanley Crouch of the Daily News in New York who wrote an article last year, entitled “What Obama isn’t: Black Like Me.” Facetiously, for one thing, Barack Obama is not black like Crouch, who could be a carbon copy of Obama’s father in being pitched black. Calling Pan-Africanism a naive idea, Crouch wrote, “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.”
Then he surmissed why Obama couldn’t really claim to be a real black. “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.”
Crouch further makes the point of how Obama would have come in from a different door if he were to win the presidency, not with the blessing of authentic African-Americans. Said he, “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.” Such arrant nonsense!!
First of all, as one of the commentators pointed out in reply to Crouch’s article, “Crouch is an idiot.” Secondly, my grandmother used to say that people who are ugly behave in an ugly manner. And so it is with Stanley Crouch. Crouch is of course not the only black writer or leader who has been making this point of Barack Obama not being black enough because he is not a descendant of “plantation slave blacks.” Come to think of it, most of the so-called black leaders who have been leading the black community through the centuries have been blacks with white blood in their veins, even with greater percentage than Obama’s.
Stanley Crouch’s polluting article, reminds of an article in the June 24, 2004 New York Times, in which Profs Lani Gurnier and Henry Louis Gates questioned the wisdom of Harvard University and other Ivy league schools, admitting more children of West Indians and Africans than the children of “plantation slave blacks.” Here is what the article said, “While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.
“They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.” Mind you, Guinier is the daughter of a Jewish mother, Eugenia Paprin, and the Jamaican-born scholar Ewart Guinier, who also served as Harvard professor (and chair) of the Afro-American Studies Department in 1969. Just imagine her making this point!! Doesn’t it remind you of Justice Clarance Thomas?
In a few months, Americans would be going to the polls to nominate the presidential candidates for both parties. Black Americans should not fall into the narcism of Republican apologists like Stanley Crouch and his co-horts about deciding why Barack Obam should be nominated based on whether he is a descendant of “plantation slave blacks” or that of the more encompassing African-American. Their votes should be based on who should fulfill the aspirations of African-Americans.
Chika Onyeani is Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of the African Sun Times, author of the internationally acclaimed No.1 bestselling book, “Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success,” as well as the blockbuster novel, “The Broederbond Conspiracy.”
