Obama and the "Authenticity" Paradox

Originally posted at Too Sense:

Not once during the entire 2008 election cycle has any writer or commentator asked whether John Edwards is "white enough." Mike Huckabee has not been placed under the "authenticity" microscope to see if he is "really" white, or...something else. And Mitt Romney? Well, as noted before, he is possibly the Whitest Man Alive. No questions as to his identity.

Barack Obama gets an entirely different treatment. For him, in the eyes of the press and the punditocracy, his skin tone is not enough to prove his identity. He...looks black...but is he black enough? Is he really black?

According to Salon's Debra Dickerson, "'Black,' in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves." Well, yes. Frequently that's true. But not always. There are black people who descend not from slaves but from free persons of color. There are even black people whose ancestors owned slaves. It's not as simple as Dickerson, and others, want to put it.

Slavery has had and continues to have a greater impact on the black community than any other single historical fact. The assumptions that people make about black folks, and their attitudes towards black folks, are inevitably affected by the legacy of slavery. But those assumptions are often applied to, and those attitudes expressed towards, people who are visually taken for "black" whether or not they descend from slaves. Sad to say, appearance still matters in this country. To look black is to be black, at least in the eyes of the white community (and many non-white communities). As Obama himself has said, he's plenty black enough for a New York cabbie to refuse to pick him up.

What exactly are the people who doubt Obama's authenticity asking of him? Is there some requirement that he have suffered directly from the oppressive racism that many black people have experienced? If that's the case, there are a fair few middle-class and upper-middle-class black people (particularly those in their 20s and 30s) who fail the test. For the generation born and raised after the end of legal segregation, first-hand experience with racism is not a foregone conclusion. Does Obama need to have grown up impoverished in an urban ghetto in order to "really" be black? Again, if that's true all of the black folks who grew up in suburbia had better start looking for a new racial identity. Surely Obama is not being asked to talk "black", is he? If speaking urban slang is a litmus test now, Kobe Bryant has some explaining to do.

All of the differences between Obama and the "average" black person don't mean that Obama isn't black. What Obama proves is that the definition of "blackness" is necessarily a fluid thing. There is too much diversity of experience, and too much diversity of heritage, to assume that "blackness" means one thing and one thing only.