Home > Gwinnett > Rick Badie / My Opinion > Archives > 2007 > August > 21
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Questioning Obama’s racial qualifications
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Is he black enough?
I can’t remember Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton being asked this question during their presidential bids, but Sen. Barack Obama can’t escape it. He’s being interrogated on the campaign trail, in debates and town hall meetings on how deep his black roots grow.
When he was asked the question during the otherwise excellent CNN/YouTube debate, he responded — and I paraphrase — with a retort about being more than black enough whenever he tries to hail a cab in Manhattan. It drew chuckles from the audience in Charleston, S.C., and it was funny.
But this apparent issue — the question — isn’t. Au contraire. But it’s oh-so-typical America and how we handle issues of race.
Remember Mandisa Surpris?
In December 2005, I wrote about the Parkview High School student. Some black peers ridiculed her because she spoke properly, preferred certain clothes, played the violin and belonged to the Beta club and National Arts Honors Society. She earned high grades and kept her focus on the future. So Mandisa, then a sophomore, apparently didn’t pass the code.
She was un-black. Too white. Too spirited of an individual to be confined to a box, be it by blacks or whites.
Now, on a larger scale, we have Mr. Obama.
Obama isn’t black enough, but Bill Clinton is?
Obama wants to be president, a pursuit that has invigorated election-year politics and awakened the Hillary Clinton camp to a stark reality that securing the Democratic presidential party nomination won’t be a waltz in the park. Obama — he of mixed racial heritage and exceptional educational pedigree and social graces — is a serious contender.
But is he black enough?
Five months ago, Patricia Wilson-Smith founded the Gwinnett-based Black Women for Obama, a grass-roots organization that’s working with Obama’s national campaign in his quest for the nation’s highest office. The local chapter, one of three in the country, meets monthly to strategize, organize events and solicit members. Wilson-Smith says she’s always been interested in politics, but never this intrigued by one particular candidate enough to jump in.
“I’ve always been the sideline player,” said Wilson-Smith, 42, a Web technology consultant who lives in Lawrenceville.
Then came Obama.
“It was after lots of reading about Clinton, Obama, Richardson, Edwards and Biden that I settled on Sen. Obama,” she told me in an e-mail. “I truly believe that he has the best vision for turning the country in a better direction. What I heard from him resonated with me, specifically his desire to lead the ENTIRE country, in an inclusive way.”
But is he black enough?
Well, Wilson-Smith recently wrote an essay on the subject. It’s posted on the Black Women For Obama Web site (www.BlackWomenForObama.org). In it, she writes about being bused out of her black neighborhood school to attend all-white campuses. Before long, some neighborhood kids begin to shun her because she was gifted and willing to embrace new things and ideas. They questioned her blackness.
Like Mandisa, some said she acted “too white,” as if a correlation exists ‘twixt race and academic prowess. She eventually was accepted into an exclusive white private school, only to be denied enrollment because the school had reached its minority quota for that particular school year.
“Always, always, the struggle with too black, too white,” she wrote.
It is an age-old question, one that I suspect Obama’s handlers prepared him to expect on the road to the White House. It reeks of nonsense, too, and I agree with the way Wilson-Smith summed it up the her essay.
“To ask a man that has worked tirelessly in the inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago helping to rebuild communities, a man that has stood side by side with black religious leaders to solve problems in the worst neighborhoods in the city if he’s ‘black enough’ is nothing short of ridiculous,” she wrote.
“Like Sen. Obama, I think those who even dare ask that intensely stupid question seek to strip him of his blackness because they feel a certain discomfort over his biracial ethnicity and are unable to relate to his culturally diverse background. Me? I consider that both those aspects of him have done a great deal to shape who he is as a man, just as my experiences as a young child worked to shape the woman I have become, for better or worse.”
For more information , visit www.BlackWomenForObama.org, or call Patricia Wilson-Smith at 678-768-8527.
Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail rbadie@ajc.com.
Permalink | Comments (131) | Post your comment | Categories: Rick Badie
