The real racists are those who feel they must endlessly analyze a person's background in order to decide - because they are the Supreme Deciders - whether or not he is "black."

Who cares?

I don't. I'm not fond of Condaleeza Rice or Colin Powell, not because of the shade of my skin, but because of their actions in the Bush administration. Does race subliminally play a part? Maybe. But I don't have the time nor am I about to be paid writing snarky articles for major periodicals to analyze why this might be so. At any rate, I would never vote for a person based solely on skin color or because he made me, as a white person, feel "safe" or "non-racist." What a patronizing assumption.

"Saturday Night Live" did a skit where Hilary Clinton claimed that SHE was half-black. It emerged that the "real" reason she didn't care for Obama was because he thoughtfully studied issues and then made a decision. A candidate who actually thinks? Horrors.

I must say, as a white person, I am sick to death of white folks getting stupid and defensive when anything related to race comes up.

Yes, Obama is a "safe" one, both for his immigrant ancestry and for the lightness of his skin. We can point to him and Colin Powell and pat ourselves on the back for being sooo progressive, while at the same time putting a defensive hand on our bags when white folks walk down the street in Harlem. We allow a select few educated 10-percent-African-American folks into power? Okay, doesn't mean much if the vast majority of Black folks are scary to white people and/or in poverty.

You know, immigrants are "okay" because they're foreign, they're other. A Kenyan immigrant in a private white high school is the same as the Bosnian refugee there - he's an example of our "generosity," our "openmindedness." But bring an honest-to-goodness American Black person there?? No one talked to her, except her girlfriend and her queer friends. (myself included.)

We can accept immigrants because they're an example of this backwards "third world," that we can pretend we're not responsible for their poverty. But dark American Black folks represent the failings of this so-called "equality," this "American Dream" -- they represent the fact that the civil rights movement can't be over, that work is not done. We may technically have legal equality, but social equality is a long way off.

"Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."

"There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."

"Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope?...I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores...the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!"*

Debra Dickerson needs to go back and actually read Obama. Maybe she'll get discover the actual audacity of hope, and lose some of her boatload of cynicism...

*http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-07-27-obama-speech-text_x.htm

Debra Dickerson said both that she likes Barack Obama and that she thinks his political success is a sign of progress. It takes nothing away from his impressive credentials to say that part of his appeal to whites is that he is a non-threatening black man. If you immediately perceive Dickerson's analysis of the nuances of racial politics to be a personal attack, maybe it is time to look at little more closely at your own reasons for supporting Obama. After all, Jesse Jackson was also a charismatic speaker and an experienced politcal leader when he ran for president.

I think this intriguing article misses a few points.

First, Obama is connected to slavery and Jim Crow in the same sense that most blacks alive today are: through relatives who experienced or told us about those traumatic eras. You have to believe that Michelle, his "traditionally black" US-born wife, and her extended family, are divorced from that painful heritage and its troubling ongoing effects to believe that Obama has no authentic connection to these eras from which to speak with real emotion. I doubt that's the case.

Second, like Colin and Tiger, Obama "ain't that black," as Powell onced candidly explained his easy breach and negotiation of comfort zones at the commanding heights. Powell was right, of course, and DD is for the same reasons on that point about whites' eager embrace of Obama now. However, although Obama's light, he could never pass for anything but black, especially with the afro he sported in school. He experienced discimination back then and maybe still does outside the bubble of celebrity. Contemporary racism, more than the country's original sin of slavery, is what diminishes, enrages and connects many blacks. If the whites who raised Obama gave him a sense that he was more and better than racists percieved him to be, great; that's the same pride US-born black parents try to instill in their kids.

Third, I think Obama's pre-Harvard community work in Chicago's public housing projects taught him a lot about one salient legacy of slavery: the deeply ingrained, mutually reinforcing racial segregation and poverty that left the people he tried to mobilize for reform isolated, largely impotent, self-hating and self-destructive.

For all of these reasons, I think Obama can proceed with a certain integrity even as he cultivates (and beneifts from) his cross-over appeal.

So many things to say...

Least on topic, to Chole and others who lament being blamed for the sins of their (race's?) fathers: people have short memories. It is not the sins of your fathers, it is, indeed, the sins of many people walking the streets today that many black people are concerned with. Jim Crow? It wasn't ages past when I couldn't [insert Jim Crow restriction here]. And there are -gasp!- still some old timers living today who remember family members who were slaves (some of them are in my family). This "it's the 21st Century, get over it" attitude is a bit patronizing and pretty ignorant.

But onto the topic at hand. Debra's essay surely deserves more than a flippant "black people need to get over themselves, I'm not racist" reaction, whether you agree with it or not.

I think the essay leads to three distinct considerations:

1) Why is the discussion about Obama being black? Why isn't it about being white? I think it's so interesting that his heritage is, as far as it's being discussed, split between two 'races,' but the question isn't "is he black, or white?" it's "is he black?" (By the way, I think the answer is pretty obviously "he's mixed," but what do I know..)

2) Maybe this is the answer to question 1, but for most of his life, most Americans, I'd bet, have seen Obama as a black man. And as sure as I -- with a traditional, meandering genealogy that leads to West Africa with some rape and willing mixing thrown in -- experience all those things in which non-blacks often associate with an obsession with race, so does he.

3) If working in the projects of Chicago and "understanding" the effects of discrimination, or marrying a "real" black person makes you "really" black, then there are plenty of people with blue eyes, blond hair, and white skin who qualify.

Not that this speaks to his presidential qualifications, but I think it's an equally important discussion.