If you have a little time on your hands, you should use it to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ superb rumination on the nature - and abundance - of Obama’s blackness. In the piece, Coates describes the roots of Obama’s blackness, skillfully disarms Shelby Steele’s (among others) contention that Obama isn’t black, and (on some level) tackles the question of what it means to be black for a young black person in 21st century America. And that, for me at least, is a discussion which deeply resonates with my experiences:
Obama’s blackness is at once futuristic and conservative. It recalls the blackness displayed in the novels of Zora Neale Hurston, in which racial paranoia is rendered an afterthought; it also reflects the experience of generations of black people who’ve encountered white America not as an idea but as a collection of individuals.
Barack Obama hails from Hawaii, but he also has roots in a rather large tribe of African-Americans of recent vintage who are intimately acquainted with both Americas. Some of them were raised in the affluent suburbs by parents who’d known only the rot of inner cities. Many others, like Obama, are the product of interracial unions, privileged to experience both white and black people on intimate levels. They are the ones who spurned the Ivy League for Spelman and Morehouse, or who rebuffed offers from corporate law firms for a return to the streets. [...]
What they all shared was a flight from bastions of whiteness, where their names were often shackled to the prefixes “first” and “only.” What they shared was a constant flurry of backhanded compliments from their white peers, who, having witnessed them succeed at anything nonathletic (AP English, debate team, smile), would assure them that they “were not really black” or at least “were not like other blacks.” [...]
They were some of the most confident black people I’d ever known. All our lives we’d been raised to see white people as wraiths, as demigods worthy of either complete subservience or unrelenting opposition. This was the logic of our parents, who’d never been free to see whites as fully human and thus to see themselves in the same way. It’s also the logic that Shelby Steele thinks still dominates black America. What I learned from the black émigrés who’ve walked through America, and what I gathered as I aged and walked the land myself, was that the much-ballyhooed powers of white people were neither good nor wicked, just overrated.
This is the blackness of Barack Obama. It is an identity that asserts itself without conscious thought. It has no need of marches and placards. It rejects an opportunistic ignorance of racism but understands that esoteric ramblings about white-skin privilege do not move the discussion further. It does not need to bluster, to scream, to hyperbolize. Obama’s blackness is like any other secure marker of identity, subtle and irreducible to a list of demands.
A good deal of this describes my life thus far; I grew up in a largely white, solidly middle-class suburb in Virginia Beach, raised by parents who grew up working-class and (in my father’s case) intimately aware of the degradation and desperation characteristic of too much of black life. And, as Coates writes, part of growing up in that environment was encountering and understanding white people as individuals. Unlike older black folks, I didn’t have to reject some notion of white people as a towering monolith, since I was never really able to form that conception. But I did have to get past the anger which arose - bitter and hostile - from the “constant flurry of backhanded compliments” from my white peers. The fact that I ended up applying to and accepting a spot at a predominantly white, southern university (rather than an HBCU, for which I occasionally have a tinge of regret) is clear evidence that I did, with the help of course, of my close white friends.
But, again like Coates notes, the biggest thing about growing up in a white environment (especially for someone like myself, who was often charged with “sounding too white), was learning to assert my blackness without dwelling on it. Which simply boiled down to learning how to become comfortable with myself as a person, and letting my blackness speak for itself.
The fact that Obama is obviously comfortable with his blackness is part of what attracts me to him; here is a black politician who doesn’t need to spend every moment of the day (I’m looking at you Al Sharpton) reminding everyone that he’s black. He simply is. And his confidence in his identity is, I think, part of what makes him such an engaging and remarkable public figure.
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