Obama's racial identity and politics

[Adelante]

This is a pretty personal profile of Obama and his challenges as a biracial candidate.

The Identity Card
Friday, Nov. 30, 2007, Time
By SHELBY STEELE

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1689619-1,00.html

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There is the unspoken hope that his mixed-race freshness carries a broader political originality. And, in fact, he does embody something that no other presidential candidate possibly can: the idealism that race is but a negligible human difference. Here is the radicalism, innate to his pedigree, which automatically casts him as the perfect antidote to America's exhausted racial politics. This is the radicalism by which Martin Luther King Jr. put Americans in touch--if only briefly--with their human universality. Barack Obama is the progeny of this idealism. As such, he is a living rebuke to both racism and racialism, to both segregation and identity politics--any form of collective chauvinism.

Thus, the cultural and historical implications of Obama's candidacy are clearly greater than its public policy implications. While Obama the man labors in the same political vineyard as his competitors, mapping out policy positions on everything from war to health care, his candidacy itself asks the American democracy to complete itself, to achieve that almost perfect transparency in which color is indeed no veil over character--where a black, like a white, can put himself forward as the individual he truly is. This is the high possibility that the Obama campaign points to quite apart from its policy goals.

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What sort of alienation drives this resolve? When, at the age of 2, Barack Obama was abandoned by his African father, he lost both a father and accessibility to a black identity--not necessarily a politicized identity but that much simpler and more profound feeling of unselfconsciously belonging to a people. Here was a kid, accountable in the world as a black, being raised by whites--mother, grandmother, and grandfather. Nothing in the world wrong with this. In fact, the fine young man that Obama became has to be credited in large part to the devotion of his extraordinary mother--a woman who, in Indonesia, got her young son up at 4 five days a week to run him through English lessons before his Indonesian school day even began. And yet absences, like father and race, can quite irrationally open up deep--almost insatiable--longings.

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So, yes, Obama's interracial background puts him at cross purposes. It gives him a racelessness that is politically appealing to whites, but it also draws him toward precisely the kind of self-conscious black identity that alienates whites. For nearly two decades Barack Obama has attended a black church on the South Side of Chicago that his own mother could never have felt comfortable in. It subscribes to a "Black Value System" in which "black" was always the operative word--"black family," "black community," "black freedom," etc. But it was not a black value system that accounted for Obama's success in life; it was the values of his white Midwestern mother. Could he stand up in his own church and say this?