- “Obama’s Oversimplified Identity” Following Barack Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, Amos Jones’s commentary published in the August 4-11 New York Amsterdam News flatly delcares that if he is black, then he is white. Please click on the title to download the PDF.
- “Black Like Obama: What the Junior Illinois Senator’s Appearance on the National Scene Reveals about Race in America, and Where We Should Go From Here” This 21-page article presented at the 90th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History in October 2005 and published later than year in Volume 31 of the Thurgood Marshall Law Review contextualizes Obama’s popular personal story within the messy legal and social framework created by centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in America. It opens with a summary of Obama’s identity as presented in his autobiography republished in 2004 and proceeds through a specific review of racial classifications in American legal history, raising the question whether Obama should even be counted as a black man.
“Black Like Obama” systematically raises other excellent questions, such as “When, how, and why did Barack Obama become black?” and is Barack Obama “passing in reverse?” (“[A]rrested proclamations are not unusual in the book. Obama thus teases those readers aware of his identification as a black man, leaving us wishing we knew precisely when he killed off the white in his line. … A suspicious reader might infer further. The latest dynamics in his life, including his conduct on the campaign trail, could evidence that Obama has adopted a bizarre practice that might be most accurately described as passing in reverse.”)
“Black Like Obama” explores policy implications and critiques uninformed media coverage implicating Tom Brokaw and the New York Times, as in the following passage: “A political milestone more comparable to Obama’s was the victory in 1989 of the first and only elected black governor in American history, Governor L. Douglas Wilder. The developments subsequent to this episode suggest[] that traditional blacks cannot be popular like Obama. Wilder, who served Virginia from 1990 to 1994, appeared in the national imagination as the grandson of slaves, a decorated Korean War veteran and self-made millionaire lawyer from Richmond who became the top elected official in a conservative Southern state where the Confederate States of America had established its capital only a few generations earlier. In a nation that has allowed slavery longer than it has forbidden it, Wilder’s election represented an enormous transformation. A veritable first, it exhibited willingness among white Southerners to support a black man that was unimaginable only one generation earlier, when the state of Virginia defended its antimiscegenation laws before the Supreme Court of the United States. Unlike Obama, Wilder beat a white man in the general election. His election thereby signified a transition of which the entire nation could have been proud. Moreover, he delivered while in office, balancing his fiscally strapped state’s budget without raising taxes. Wilder wound up a serious contender in the Democratic primary for president in 1992 but was virtually dismissed by the media. What could have been more encouraging than Wilder’s story of American redemption? What could have served as a more uplifting symbol of the country’s promise than his lifetime achievement, which originated prior to and helped to usher in the era of affirmative action? Why wasn’t Wilder’s victory blown up before America the way Obama’s was even before Obama had won the big race? Perhaps America could not so smoothly appropriate Wilder’s story because drawing attention to his accomplishments would have forced a discussion of 244 years of slavery plus 72 more years of racist segregation, which together constitute America’s most outcome-determinative disgrace. Any praise of Wilder would have had to be predicated upon his having overcome the terrors of segregated Virginia, the employment discrimination that prevented hundreds of Howard-educated lawyers (of whom he was one) from practicing anywhere, and the hostile environment of white entrenchment known to permeate Virginia politics for most of Wilder’s adult life. All of a sudden the story, however uplifting, is no longer comforting. Watching Obama, nobody has to think concretely about slavery and Jim Crow.” Please click on the title by the bullet to download the PDF.
- “America Is Ready for a Black President of the United States, But Is John Howard?” This February 15, 2007, Harvard Law Record column analyzes Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s reaction to Obama’s Iraq proposal, noting that from a global perspective, Obama appears to be black. Excerpts follow.
So why would a chief executive of a country a world apart behave so dismissively toward such a contender? Given the strangeness of Howard’s behavior and its cavalier unreasonableness, those of us who have been victimized by racism are entitled to wonder whether Howard proceeded as he did because Obama is known as the black candidate.
I was one of the first political journalists and legal commentators to question Obama’s categorization when he emerged on the national scene in 2004, flatly stating on the editorial page of the New York Amsterdam News in August of that year that if Obama is black, then he is white. In 2005, I developed the analytical and policy problem of his being grouped simply as a black person in a 21-page article presented at the 2005 annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and subsequently published in Volume 31 of the Thurgood Marshall Law Review. There, I pointedly started from the question, “When, how, and why did Obama become black?” and later discussed the policy problems created for descendants of American slaves (like me) when black American demography is clouded by people whose families were not suffering under recent slavery and segregation but who nevertheless historically and presently disproportionately reap the benefits of policies including affirmative action in higher education while also benefiting from the ill-gotten gains of white privilege (through half of their family trees).
Nevertheless, I agree with Obama in his statement to “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft in an interview unrelated to the Howard strife that aired on Sunday night across the United States on CBS stations: “If you look African-American, you are treated like one.” And from a global point of view, Obama is definitely black.
Please click on the title by the bullet to link to the article.
