Is Barack Obama Black?

Some question for a fat old Jewish guy to raise, isn't it?

An explanation is in order. I'm not doubting that Barack Obama has ancestry from sub saharan Africa, or saying that he does not have physical features that are usually called "black" in a USA context. More, I don't doubt for a minute that Barack Obama has suffered various humiliations and insults commonly experienced by people who are called "black" in a USA context. No doubt empty taxis whizzed right by him when as a student at Columbia he stood out on Broadway trying to get a cab. I could imagine hassles with store security, with cops, you name it. Obama looks like an African American, and no doubt he has been (mis)treated as such. Also I would not deny the oppression of British colonialism and the aftermath in Kenya that must have shaped his father as well.

I still have a problem with this thing of calling Barack Obama and African American.

Black and black, not the same thing, black with a small "b" is a color, Black with a capital "B" is not, it's a people, a nationality, an ethnic group with its own history and needs and interests. When the ethnic group whose ancestors were slaves in the United States of America and legally discriminated against, and subjected to travails outside the law but still in force in the United States are obscured and melded into other groups of people they and their own particular interests may get lost.

My daughter tells me that when she attended Stuyvesant High School, an elite and highly competitive public High School, there was a percentage of the students designated as African American. As far as she knew possibly none of them actually were the descendants of slaves in the US of A, but this "accomplishment" could be pointed to while the descendants of slaves were still not on the inside!

At Administration for Children's Services, where I worked for over ten years, most of the people are African descended and of dark complexion. They implement the viciously anti Black policies of the government in destroying families and the lives of African American children most of all (along with others) but few are African American in the sense I am trying to bring out here. There is a body of people, a people, to whom the US owes a special and particular debt and obligation and this is separate and apart from anything else, regardless of similarities and merits, and advancing people who look like the descendants of US enslaved people but are not, is a trick being pulled out of a trick bag.


May Obama win, even though he is striving to make clear that he is not the Black candidate.

Happy Bastille Day! (one day late)