Quote:
Originally posted by Steeltrap
An Appeal Beyond Race
By SCOTT L. MALCOMSON
Published: August 1, 2004
ON Tuesday, at about 9 p.m., Barack Obama was an Illinois state
legislator running for the Senate.
A half-hour later, after he had given the keynote address at the
Democratic National Convention, he was the party's hot ticket. Pundits even predicted he would be the first black president.
That's a lot to hang on one speech. But the reaction to his speech
tells you a lot about racial politics in the United States today.
Mr. Obama, 42, was not raised by black parents. His mother, who is white and from Kansas, split with his father, a Kenyan economist, when he was just a toddler. His father returned to Africa - and visited his son just once, when Barack was 10.
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama's mother and her parents raised him, mainly in Hawaii. He did not grow up in a black world and his family had no particular connection to the black experience in America. Yet Mr. Obama had black skin and that made him, like it or not, a black man with a place in the centuries-long story of race in America.
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Interesting piece. Not that I think Obama was trying to do it, but it appeared the author was, in a nuanced way, trying to scrub away, de-emphasize Obama's blackness, and to somehow offer this as at least a secondary reason for Obama's rise among white voters. Is he somehow saying Obama's political positions are different than they might be had he grown up in "the hood?" does this make him somehow less polarizing, or less "threatening" to white voters?
I don't know Obamas positions well enough to even partially refute this (maybe Epitome1920 can help) but it's a curious theory to express. I wonder what he would say about Harold Ford Jr., another seen as a rising star in the D party. Does he rise somehow, because he's seen as "less black?"
things that make you go hmmmm......