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February 11, 2007 Those of us who were born black in the years just after World War II had front-row seats for the collapse of American apartheid. We started out confined to all-black communities and schools at a time when skin color was still destiny. But as segregation gave way, many of us were vaulted out of this sequestered world and into colleges, jobs and walks of life that had been closed to us pretty much since the nation’s founding. The rush of upward mobility produced the inevitable identity crisis, which led in turn to endless discussions about the meaning of blackness in a world where skin color was beginning to matter less and less. At their best, these discussions, held in college dorm rooms at night, were probing, serious and heartfelt. At their worst, they turned into lectures by the race police — ’60s-era ideologues who characterized blackness not as a matter of individual interpretation or choice, but as a narrow set of attitudes and experiences that were said to make up the authentic black identity. Back then, black Americans who came from successful, suburban and upwardly mobile families were regularly dismissed as white or inauthentic. The authentic black experience, it was said at the time, was limited to the hard-core, impoverished upbringing that black people often chose to brag about, even when they had actually grown up with private prep schools in the lap of luxury. The race police ran rampant in the black community itself, but were rarely heard in the white world. But they have been parading up and down Main Street since Senator Barack Obama of Illinois — the son of a black African father and a white American mother — made clear that he intended to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. The arguments being raised about Mr. Obama’s blackness — or his lack of blackness — seem positively antique at a time when Americans are moving away from the view of ancestry as a central demographic fact and toward a view that dispenses with those traditional boundaries. Even so, the complaints about Mr. Obama provide an interesting opportunity to examine the passing of the old and the rise of the new. The claim that the candidate isn’t really black because his mother is white carries little weight under either system. It makes no sense at all to the young Americans who checked more than one box when identifying themselves by race in the last census. They subscribe to a fluid notion of race and seem perfectly willing to let people describe themselves racially any way they choose. Nor does the charge make sense in the black community itself. That community has historically and eagerly embraced as black anyone and everyone with any African ancestry to speak of. That embrace often included interracial families, who lived in black communities long before they were accepted elsewhere. It included even blue-eyed, sandy-haired people like the civil rights leader Walter White, whose black ancestry was imperceptible to the naked eye. The carpetbagging black Republican Alan Keyes opened up this racialist can of worms when he opposed Mr. Obama in the Illinois Senate race back in 2004. Badly outmatched and reaching for any brick he could find, Mr. Keyes blurted out that Mr. Obama was not black because he was not descended from slaves. The Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch later seemed to second that view, saying that Mr. Obama had not “lived the life of a black American.” The heritage of slavery is of course central to African-American life. But that is a fairly recent recognition for many of us who grew up black in the second half of the 20th century. Black families like mine dealt with the stigma and humiliation of slavery by simply suppressing it. My older uncles, for example, grew up in regular contact with relatives who had been born into slavery, but never mentioned it to me. Silence about slavery at home was matched by neglect of the topic at school. As a result, I was nearly 40 years old and writing a book about my family when I stumbled upon the news of my enslaved relatives in a newsletter from a small historical society. The claim that Mr. Obama has not lived the typical African-American life is closer to the nub of what bothers his black traditionalist critics. Their complaint goes right back to the race police of the 1960s who decreed that the only authentic black experience was one that featured hardship and crushing encounters with racism, preferably with an urban American backdrop. Mr. Obama missed out on that part while growing up an introspective child, longing for his missing father, in Hawaii and Indonesia. He stumbled onto the mysteries of race in his own good time and pursued them in his own way. His quest took him to an impoverished community on the South Side of Chicago, where he worked as an organizer in an infamous public housing project before discovering his vocation as a politician. His critics are at least right when they describe his journey as a departure from the customary stereotype. But they are fundamentally wrong when they try to argue that the journey described in his affecting 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” is somehow incompatible with blackness. At bottom, the hue and cry over Barack Obama’s identity stems from a failure by black traditionalists to recognize multiracial versions of themselves. Soon enough, perhaps by year’s end, however, the Obama story, which seems so exotic to so many people now, will have found its place among all the other stories of the sprawling black diaspora. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company |
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