The Right Discussion

On the heels of this week's political firestorm surrounding Senator Biden's racial comments, Time magazine featured an article entitled Is Obama Black Enough?. In it the author discusses how many, especially those in the African-American community, are questioning whether the junior Senator from Illinois is "black enough" to connect with African-American voters.

Several recent polls have indicated that black voters are more comfortable with Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama. Up until recently most commentators had assumed that Obama could take the black vote for granted. Now there is a scramble to figure out why that is not the case.

First, it is true that Senator Obama is of mixed race--his mother white and his father a Kenyan--but to my knowledge he has never used that fact (though he could) to separate himself from the African-American community. By all accounts he considers himself black, and therefore a member of the black community. Unfortunately for him, many within that community do not see the Senator the same way. For example, black author Debra J. Dickerson recently said, "Obama isn't black" and African-American colonist Stanley Couch authored a piece entitled, What Obama Isn't: Black Like Me.The fact that the Senator is of mixed race may play a part in this sentiment. What is more likely, however, is that the African-American community is recognizing something that many have been afraid or unwilling to discuss for a long time: conversations about "race" are more often about culture than they are about color.

Talking about someone's culture seems to be even more sensitive than talking about that same person's color. It speaks to who we are, where we were raised, how our parents raised us, what our friends were/are like, how we speak, and all these thinks help form our very identity. Color is about one thing: what a person looks like. Culture is about who we are.

Couch put this well in his column:

So when black Americans refer to Obama as "one of us," I do not know what they are talking about...while he has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own - nor has he lived the life of a black American.

Barack Obama is black, but according to many African-Americans he is not "black". He understands this dilemma, as he acknowledged it in his most recent book.

What seems to be coming into focus is that many of us who have been having excellent "conversations about race" (the current buzzterm in my field for talking about how to help minorities achieve more), we may well be having the wrong conversation. In order to move America's race relations forward we need to be able to acknowledge this fact: there are many different cultures in America, and those cultures too often come into conflict. Simply, many African-Americans are identifying that Barack is of a culture different from their own.

The terms "white culture" and "black culture" are poor and misleading because they assign a culture to a person because of color. There are, yes, two widespread cultures. These two cultures are vastly different. It is also true that many white people belong to one culture, and many black people to the other. But talking about these cultures in terms of "black" and "white" locks us into a discussion about race, and leads us to ignore the cultural differences that, in my view, are at the heart of improving race relations.

On the whole it seems that the presence of Barack Obama in the presidential race can serve as a very positive development. If nothing else, it helps many of us to have those great "conversations about race". Hopefully it will do even more than that. Hopefully it will allow us to have the discussion about America's two major cultures and how to move them toward much more positive relations.