Posted on 12/17/2006 9:02:23 AM PST by shrinkermd
The possible presidential candidacy of the biracial senator has sparked an illuminating debate on race.
WE KNOW this: Barack Obama is a rising star. He's a powerful speaker and a gifted writer. He is the only African American serving in the U.S. Senate. But is he black?
That's what New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch asked last month, and his answer was decidedly "no." No, Crouch wasn't just employing the old "blacker than thou" canard. Nor was he concerned with the fact that Obama was raised by his white mother. Rather, he was treating blackness not just as a racial (shared biology) identity but as an ethnic (shared historical experience) one. And isn't that what the switch of terms from "black" to "African American" was all about?
Think back to the late 1980s, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson became the most prominent black to call for the adoption of the term African American. "Just as we were called colored, but were not that," he said, "and then Negro, but not that, to be called black is just as baseless…. Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of maturity." The problem, of course, is that most black Americans are descendants of slaves who had their African cultural heritage brutally stripped from them.
What Crouch is arguing is that what the majority of black Americans share is their ancestors' experience as human chattel, brought to these shores in the grips of chains. Slavery and segregation not only forged a rigid racial line between black and white but created a shared ethnic experience. For Crouch, the fact that Obama's father — whom Obama met only once — was a black Kenyan...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Did he benefit from affirmative action at Harvard?
But, he doesn't have an American first name: And he found it important to do photo ops in Kenya.
Forget about what color he is. It's a red herring that only plays into his hands. The real question is just how far to the left he really is.
And he attended Catholic school while in Indonesia.
ping
Possibly in admission to Harvard Law, however Obama went on to graduate Magma Cum Laude, and as Editor of the Harvard Law Review. Tests and papers within the school for those named Baraka would presumably not get additional points.
"Are either of his parents from Africa?"
His father was from Kenya.
That was easy.
It sure was, as I already posted down thread.
See my post #96
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