{"id":95,"date":"2011-06-02T21:50:22","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T01:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=95"},"modified":"2011-06-02T21:50:22","modified_gmt":"2011-06-03T01:50:22","slug":"is-it-a-black-thing-with-the-obamas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/06\/is-it-a-black-thing-with-the-obamas.html","title":{"rendered":"Is it a “Black Thing” with the Obamas?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone who has read Barack Obama\u2019s autobiographies knows that our 44th<\/sup> president has had a lifelong obsession with discovering (or creating?) a racial identity for himself. He is very candid about this in his Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, <\/em>his first\u2014and more honest\u2014memoir; indeed, Dreams <\/em>is nothing more than a recounting of this odyssey, an epic journey that begins within the midst of the contradictions and ambiguities of the overwhelmingly white world in which Obama was raised and that culminates in the clarity and coherence of black Africa.<\/p>\n

Obama, that is, is black by choice, <\/em>and like any convert, he is animated by zealotry to establish himself as a \u201cTrue Believer.\u201d\u00a0 If he labors under any self-delusions, they are no less the products of his choice than his \u201cblackness\u201d itself, for it is from Obama\u2019s painful self-awareness that his guilt over his unfamiliarity with \u201cthe black experience\u201d in America is begotten: the conspicuous absence in his blood line of American slaves; a black father who abandoned him when he was but a small child; the white grandparents who raised him; his upbringing, not in the \u201cghettos\u201d or \u201choods\u201d of America\u2019s \u201cinner cities,\u201d but the plush islands of Hawaii; the private educational institutions that he attended all throughout his life, from elementary school to law school; and the preponderance of friendships with mostly white kids growing up are among the circumstances that conspire to incessantly provoke Obama to prove his \u201cauthenticity\u201d to black America.\u00a0 This singular focus on convincing himself and others of his authentic blackness explains Obama\u2019s aching need to recast the events of his own life, both its past and present stages, in the light of an imaginary \u201cracism\u201d that allegedly informs them; yet it also accounts for his conduct from before and after he was elected president.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s decisions to: become a \u201ccommunity organizer\u201d in the \u201cghettos\u201d of Chicago; join the church of Jeremiah Wright\u2014an ally of Louis Farrakhan who Obama claims to have regarded as a \u201cspiritual mentor\u2014and remain a member in good standing for over twenty years; attend Farrakhan\u2019s \u201cMillion Man March\u201d; work closely with ACORN, a corrupt organization responsible for extorting from banks loans for aspiring \u201clow-income\u201d (read: black) property owners; \u00a0and, in spite of conceding his ignorance of the facts of the situation, express sympathy for his black friend, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., while castigating the white police officers with whom Gates had an encounter, are just some of the deeds that reflect Obama\u2019s burning desire to achieve security in his \u201cblackness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet there are other, more subtle actions that our president has taken that could very well be just as driven by this desire.\u00a0 For the time being, we can leave to one side Obama\u2019s signature policy position on \u201cHealth Care Reform,\u201d his nationalization of significant swaths of the banking and automobile industries, and his attempts to design energy policy around the fiction of \u201cGlobal Warming,\u201d all of which promise to effect a massive redistribution of resources from \u201cthe haves\u201d to \u201cthe have not\u2019s,\u201d from whites to non-whites, from Americans and Westerners to non-Americans and non-Westerners.\u00a0 Such policies are \u201creparations\u201d by other names and Obama knows it, but the engagements (or disengagements) that betray his fervor to prove his \u201cblackness\u201d have none of the grandiosity of these.<\/p>\n

Whether it is his near obsequiousness regarding Islamic nations; his steadfast refusal to secure the southern border and comparably steadfast resolve to insure that neither Arizona nor any other border state realize that goal; the coolness of his reception of such traditional, Eurocentric American allies as England and Israel and corresponding affection for an assortment of Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries; his reluctance to grant General Petraeus\u2019s request for tens of thousands of additional American soldiers in Afghanistan; his complicity in the left\u2019s smear campaign of the Tea Party as \u201cracist\u201d; his irresponsible and baseless insinuations that Arizona\u2019s latest efforts to address the violent ravages of illegal immigration are the function of nothing other than \u201cracist\u201d and \u201canti-immigrant\u201d sentiment; his appointment of various leftwing radicals to positions in his cabinet and the Supreme Court; his Justice Department\u2019s decision to refrain from prosecuting not just thugs from the New Black Panther Party who had been caught on video intimidating and threatening white voters who would dare to vote for John McCain over Obama, but, according to one of its attorneys, any <\/em>black defendants accused of victimizing whites;\u00a0 his frequent golf outings and other holidays\u2014including his wife\u2019s much publicized extravagant vacation to Spain; and his choice to mark a radical departure from a cherished American tradition of presidents appearing at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day last year to honor the dead by sending his vice-president in his stead are, I contend, the equivalent of \u201ccode words,\u201d acts designed to convey to \u201cpeople of color\u201d around the world that the Obamas are in solidarity with them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In his first memoir, Obama says that he stopped \u201cadvertising\u201d his mother\u2019s race when he was still a young boy of twelve or 13, for he feared that in so doing, he would \u201cingratiate\u201d himself to whites.\u00a0 Think not that this fear has eased.\u00a0 In fact, it is likely that it has only intensified, for even with his unrivaled sophistical skills Obama could never persuade himself that he doesn\u2019t owe his current position to the white vote.\u00a0 The country remains, much to the left\u2019s chagrin, predominantly white.\u00a0 If Obama loses enough white support, which he already has, his prospects of getting re-elected are nil.\u00a0 He needs<\/em> whites, and so he is desperate to alter the growing perception that he is biased against them (thus, the readiness with which Obama urged the termination of Shirley Sherrod when her derogatory comments concerning a white farmer first surfaced), yet this need is outflanked by his need to perceive himself, and to be perceived by others, as \u201cauthentically black,\u201d and so he is hypersensitive to giving the impression that he needs whites.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I am convinced that my analysis of the Obamas is on target.\u00a0 But even if my speculations should run aground, is it really that unfair to ask whether, with the Obamas, all of this doesn\u2019t ultimately boil down to a \u201cblack thing?\u201d<\/p>\n

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who has read Barack Obama\u2019s autobiographies knows that our 44th president has had a lifelong obsession with discovering (or creating?) a racial identity for himself. 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