Politics: Obama

Biden on Obama: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Offensive? Not to Obama. Probably to every other Black presidential candidate. But guess what, Biden is just saying what every single political observer is thinking: "Yes, Obama is black, and no, Obama is not that Black."

First, Obama is Black. Duh. He's half white, but in our one-drop culture, half is enough for Blackness unless you pull a Tiger Woods and start finding some native american in that mix.

Second, Obama is not that Black. No, not because his father's African, or because he grew up outside the US, or any of that. He's not that Black because all the usual ways of attacking a Black candidate: as outside the mainstream, as poor and inchoate and rabble-rousing, don't apply here.
Obama, in fact, is pretty invulnerable to those attacks, for one reason and one reason alone. I'll spell it: H-L-S. Obama is part of what I see as a new generation of minority leaders, many of whom are my classmates. These leaders are products of the opening of the American education system to minorities.

They've gone to top schools. They've had professional careers. Most engage in activism as a matter of personal conviction, but most also have other career objectives, other goals. Obama, for instance, was a U Chicago law professor before becoming an activist. Go ahead, pigeonhole that. It's hard to call them radicals, or rabble, or any of the things that lie behind words like "articulate and bright and clean."

So instead, they'll call him "Black, but not that Black"