[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Varqanir wrote:
Yes. Obama is a black man.
The question to ask, though, is, “is he a black man in the same sense that most black men in America are black men?” The answer to that is no.
He is not the descendent of slaves. Nobody in his family was ever forcibly transported across the Atlantic. None of his relatives were ever whipped by a white foreman on a tobacco plantation, nor chased by bloodhounds through a swamp with broken chains around their ankles. None of his ancestors were ever spit on in a public street, or forced to drink from a different faucet, go to a different school, swim at a different beach, or ride at the back of the bus. None of his family ever lived in a sharecropper’s shack, a tenement, or a ghetto. None of his family ever died in a gang shooting, nor were they ever falsely arrested or beaten by white police.
His skin is… well, not black so much as khaki, but at least as dark as, say, Jesse Jackson’s. He is well and truly African-American, being equal parts of each, but his African side is from a different side of Africa than that of 99 percent of black Americans. In short, he doesn’t share the culture of the vast majority of black Americans, any more than the son of an aristocrat from Madrid shares the same culture of the vast majority of Hispanic Americans. This is not a criticism of the man. It is merely an observation.
Does it matter? I don’t know. Should it? Or is black only skin deep?
This is an excellent observation, Varq, and I am not sure that it should matter, but most likely it does.
After all, we often hear about the importance of authenticity of experience - as in, “you have no idea what it is like to be a [minority] in this country, so you have no moral authority to [criticize, suggest remedies, etc.]”.
If that be true, then by those lights, Obama lacks the authentic experience as much as the rest of the “majority”. In fact, Obama has less of it than most of the majority, given his privileged background.
And yet. Obama - by sheer virtue of blood quantum - gets a pass on the authentic experience test, while everyone else must be measured by it. It’s an odd - and hypocritical - phenomenon.
In this election, there will be two sub-groups among the general electorate: those who will vote for Obama because he is black, and those who will vote against him because he is black. These two camps couldn’t last five minutes in a room together - on paper, they likely hate each other - but, in fact, they are both guilty of the same, stupid crime and have very similar mindsets. They have more in common than they want to admit, and they drag the rest of us down.
Obama’s candidacy has done one good thing - it has educated us to the ignorance of the race-obsessed on both sides of the transaction. 2008 is a perfect opportunity to cast a pox on both houses.[/quote]
I think many of you who’ve never had to live a day with black (brown, khaki, mocha or whatever) skin are going to have a terribly difficult time understanding this. The Black experience is not something based solely on your ancestral roots. It’s also based in what you have to face on a day to day basis. I’m willing to bet Obama has been called and treated black his entire life regardless of who his parents are or where they’re from.
I’m half asian but I promise you I’ve never been called the “asian guy”…I look black, even after people meet my asian mother they still describe me as black. Now, 99% of the time I think being black is no different from being white…but then there’s that other 1%.
I deal with clients all over the country and from time to time I run into those who on the phone think I’m the best thing since sliced bread. They fly in, come to our building, speak with my secretary who gladly walks them into my office and BAM…there’s a black guy sitting at what they knew was a white guys desk. They clam up, get all nervous and you can immediately tell they’re uncomfortable. This doesn’t bother me at all but to tell me it doesn’t happen is just saying you’ve never experienced it because you’re not black. Ask any black professional in the corporate world and I’d be willing to bet they’ve had a similar experience.
Granted, being black today is not what it was the fifties but there are still challenges involved, even for a “khaki” black man like Obama, that white men are rarely subject to.
