Obama's "blackness" questioned........

Here is a very interesting take on Barack Obama's candidacy that appears on today's Salon website. I have a premium subscription to Salon, but I'm hoping the link will allow you to read the entire article even though you don't have a membership.

The writer is Debra Dickerson a black writer and pundit with impressive credentials. Here are a couple of salient paragraphs from the article.

"Which brings me to the main reason I delayed writing about Obama. For me, it was a trick question in a game I refused to play. Since the issue was always framed as a battle between gender and race (read: non-whiteness -- the question is moot when all the players are white), I didn't have the heart (or the stomach) to point out the obvious: Obama isn't black.

"Black," in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants of African descent with markedly different outlooks on the role of race in their lives and in politics. At a minimum, it can't be assumed that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won't bother to make the distinction. They're both "black" as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black, as we use the term."

I'm still mulling this over. I'm not sure I agree with her distinction between descendants of slavery vs. "voluntary immigrants." When a cop stops an immigrant of color for "driving while black," or a landlord denies housing to him, or he and his family are subjected to racial epithets, isn't it the same thing?

~ Tom