February 10, 2010--Black Enough?

In addition to having to figure out what to do about the economy, the financial institutions, unemployment, the deficit, health care, the environment, two wars, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Haitian relief, North Korea’s nukes, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, childhood obesity, and how to work with Republicans in a bipartisan way, Barack Obama also has to figure out how black to be. And while he’s at that, how white.

According to a report in yesterday’s New York Times (linked below), his struggles with is own racial political identity as well as how he relates and responds to the African-American community, like all the other issues confronting him, is heavily fraught.

To some in the black community he is not doing enough in a targeted and dedicated way to call for and do things to address the special needs of African Americans who are unemployed disproportionately, not covered by health insurance at the same rate as whites, and not faring as well in school as Caucasians.

To others, including Al Sharpton, he is playing it just right. The reverend is working with the Obama administration and Newt Gingrich on approaches to closing the academic achievement gap. He says that it is smart not to promote this as part of “a black agenda.” That would stigmatize and doom it. Obama, he says, for the most part is doing well by seeing so-called “black issues” as American issues. In education, for example, far too many whites are also being shortchanged by the public schools they attend and thus to see this as a problem just for African Americans is neither accurate nor politically smart. Too many white folks are unemployed and in danger of losing their homes to justify a special initiative for inner-city homeowners.

And yet, and yet Obama is our first African-American president and, like it or not, this puts him under unique pressures and assures the kind of scrutiny no president has ever had to experience.

Whites, too, are also keeping a close eye on him. The radicals on the right, the out-and-out Tea Party racists, are convinced that not only is he a socialist who was not born in America but also a black militant disguised in a chic suit; but many others who are fair-minded and not deluded wonder if at some point he will tilt his agenda to unduly favor affirmative action and special carve-out programs for the benefit of only minorities.

Some of the resistance to expanding health care coverage to the uninsured, at the expense, it is claimed, of “the rest of us,” is viewed in part as an approach that would benefit primarily minorities. This in spite of Obama’s (accurate) claim that it is essential to do this not only for reasons of social justice but also because the system we have, if unmodified, will ultimately bankrupt all of us. White and black. But still suspicions linger.

Obama hasn’t said this explicitly, but he is hoping to be, or become, the first post-racial president. In a country still haunted by its racist past, wouldn’t this be an extraordinary irony, and a wonderful thing, if he, an African American, literally half-African, could help bring this about?

So he continues his delicate balancing act. On one foot attempting to do enough to maintain good relations with the black community that was so essential to his election; while balancing on the other foot, governing as an American (more irony) to acknowledge that this is not only the right way for all presidents to act but to demonstrate to the white ethnic and independent voters who also were and hopefully will continue to support him that he in fact is the person they elected.

Complicato.