Sunday, July 8, 2007

Newsweek's Obama Thumbsucker

Newsweek - MSNBC.com:
'He's got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties and concerns, and he's got to speak to them in such a way that he holds us at arm's length,' West said, pushing his hand out for emphasis. 'So he's walking this tightrope.' West challenged the candidate to answer a stark set of questions: 'I want to know how deep is your love for the people, what kind of courage have you manifested in the stances that you have and what are you willing to sacrifice for. That's the fundamental question. I don't care what color you are. You see, you can't take black people for granted just 'cause you're black.'

A few days later, West was sitting in his Princeton office after class when the phone rang. It was Barack Obama. 'I want to clarify some things,' the candidate calmly told the professor of religion and African-American studies. Over the next two hours, Obama explained his Illinois state Senate ecord on criminal justice and affordable health care. "... Just a month after ripping into him onstage, West endorsed Obama and signed up as an unpaid adviser.

West may have come around, but he raised one of the most potent—and controversial—questions facing the candidate: is he black enough? It's one that has long dogged Barack Obama's career, though he says he settled his own struggle with racial identity (as the son of an African father and white, Kansan mother) in his late teens. Questions about black "authenticity" are hardly unique to him; many successful African-Americans face them, too. Obama just happens to be grappling with the issue in full public view as he runs for the highest office in the land.

To the candidate, the debate says more about America's state of mind than it does about him. "I think America is still caught in a little bit of a time warp: the narrative of black politics is still shaped by the '60s and black power..."That is not, I think, how most black voters are thinking. I don't think that's how most white voters are thinking. I think that people are thinking about how to find a job, how to fill up the gas tank, how to send their kids to college. I find that when I talk about those issues, both blacks and whites respond well."

Many of Obama's supporters are enthralled by the content of his character—by his earnest desire to heal the nation's political divisions and to restore America's reputation in the world. Many also are excited by the color of his skin and the chance to turn the page on more than two centuries of painful racial history. But even that phrase—"turn the page"—is fraught....Obama offered an unprompted statement about "post-racial" politics: "That term I reject because it implies that somehow my campaign represents an easy shortcut to racial reconciliation. I just want to be very clear on this so there's no confusion. We're going to have a lot of work to do to overcome the long legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. It can't be purchased on the cheap." ...

Michelle had to work through her early misperceptions about him; now, she says, the nation needs to do the same. "Barack poses this interesting dilemma because we are still a country that puts people in boxes," she tells NEWSWEEK. "Barack kind of shakes up those notions because his life has crossed so many different paths. He grew up in Hawaii but he was indeed a community organizer. He became very entrenched and rooted in the black community on the South Side. He is very much a black man, but he's very much the son of his mother, who was very much a white woman, and he grew up with white grandparents." ...

[Former] Rep. Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther who had once called on black men to arm themselves for self-defense...supports Obama's run for the White House today, but still rails against a "bourgeois elite" in the country that would "rather have a Harvard-trained, smooth-talking, forever-smiling, nonthreatening African-American" than someone like himself. Yet Rush also recognizes that Obama has a rare ability to work comfortably in different worlds. "You know, Moses could not have been effective had he not been raised as the son of Pharaoh's daughter," he tells NEWSWEEK. "Moses had a relationship inside the palace, he knew the ways and wherefores of the palace ... So therefore he was accepted ... Barack has that capacity to move in and out of privilege and power." ...

No matter how he positions himself on the campaign trail, when Obama returns home to his wife and two daughters in Chicago, there's no ambiguity about identity. To Michelle, the persistent questions about Obama's roots are not about him. "We as a black community are struggling with our own identity and what it means to be black," she tells NEWSWEEK. "We see what is shown of us on TV but we also know that is not the full picture. So what is the picture? We're figuring it out. It's a conversation that needs to take place."...

"When I went back to Washington [from Selma], some people slapped me on the back and said, 'That was a wonderful celebration of African-American history.' I said, 'You don't understand: that was a celebration of American history.' Because at every juncture in American history, that's how change happens—by people coming together and deciding we're going to have a better America."

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