The blackness of Barack Obama

Barack Obama's campaign for president has barely begun, and already the questions are mounting. Is he experienced enough? Is he tough enough? And, bizarrely, is he black enough?

In the pages of the Washington Post, on the website Salon.com, on 60 Minutes and Meet the Press, debate is boiling furiously, mostly among black intellectuals and opinion leaders. Sometimes it is as crude as his parentage, born to a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother: is the glass half-black or half-white? In part it is something vaguer, more cultural: that as a Harvard-educated lawyer who grew up in places like Hawaii and Indonesia, he has little affinity with the problems of inner-city blacks. 

Usually it is an amalgam of the two: that neither his ancestry nor his experience connect him to the legacy of slavery, still the touchstone of racial politics in America. Al Sharpton, as usual, was bluntest. “Just because you’re our colour doesn’t make you our kind,” the veteran race-baiter warned recently.

It’s a pointless debate, by and large: black voters, for whose benefit the arguments for and aganst Mr. Obama’s blackness are supposedly being advanced, will decide for themselves whether and on what terms they will support him. Still, it’s fascinating that the issue should have arisen, and if it is pointless, it’s useful to know why it’s pointless. One of the things Mr. Obama’s candidacy may achieve is to confirm, not the irrelevance of race as a political issue, but the incoherence of it -- the maddening, irresolvable undefinability of it.

Take the cultural component first of all. This is hardly the first time that a black politician has been accused of “acting white” because of the way he speaks, dresses or carries himself, nor is the charge reserved to those in public life. When Bill Cosby famously complained that gangsta rappers were the “new minstrel shows,” performing a cartoonish stereotype of the threatening black male that was every bit as offensive in its way as the shuffling golliwogs of the past, was he confronting an uncomfortable truth about the uses of racism, even among its victims? Or was he, as his critics charged, simply holding blacks up to a white, middle-class mirror? Was he, in effect, a self-hating black, while the gangstas, with their invocations of pimps, drug-dealing and other aspects of street life, were the true standard-bearers of racial pride?

The same debate erupts wherever identity politics come into play. Was Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister of Britain a great step forward for women? Or was she, as more than one feminist has sniffed, just “a man in a skirt,” conservative politics being but a synonym for male values? Is gay marriage an important equality right? Or is it a sellout to “straight” values, an implied rebuke to the promiscuity that some gay theorists celebrate as part of homosexual culture? Should you wear a cochlear implant if you’re deaf? Or are you just trying to “act hearing”?

But you’re no further ahead if you retreat into genealogy. The New York Times ran an interesting article the other day on the growing trend among American blacks to refuse to identify as such on the census form, on the grounds that the very concept of belonging to “a race” was rooted in disturbing notions of racial purity. Mr. Obama’s racial heritage is questioned because he has a white mother. But for census purposes, the “one drop” rule was historically the norm: you counted as black if any of your forebears were. (And what made them black? Presumably the same.) As offensive as that sounds, any other rule would be just as arbitrary. How black is black? One-half? One-quarter? Seven-eighths?

Probe a little further, and you come to the same conclusion modern genetics has: that race, as a means of categorizing human beings, doesn’t exist. There are obviously differences in skin colour and other physical features. But the boundary lines between putative racial groups are so blurred, the distinctions so trivial in the overall genetic picture, that it is scarcely useful to speak of it.

And yet we continue to organize our thinking in this way. By coincidence, the day after the Times piece appeared, the Globe and Mail ran a story on blacks in France demanding to have their race included in the census, as a recognition of their different experience of French life. Here in Canada, we maintain a separate legal status for those of a particular genetic background, on the basis of treaties signed by their ancestors. Those treaty rights have been inherited, not by all of the original signatories’ descendants, but only some of them: the ones who kept the racial bloodline pure.

Even as we are counting chromosomes, we refuse to recognize that is in fact what we are doing. When the NDP government of Ontario under Bob Rae wanted to bring in “employment equity” -- hiring quotas -- for racial minorities, they faced a daunting practical problem: how to define membership in the preferred groups? Rather than test for skin hues and kinkiness of hair, they instead asked applicants to “self-identify.” 

In policy terms, it was nonsense. For Barack Obama, it is probably enough: if you feel black, you are.

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