Is Obama black enough, asks an unsatisfying article in Time? While this particular article may not have nailed the problem down, it does raise some interesting issues, perhaps a bit deeper than Joe Biden’s untutored mouth raised. And it is also true that all this Obama watching, testing, analyzing, may seem to be either silly or just brutal politics. Sometimes it is both, of course. He does not seem to be getting a great deal of support among blacks, and yet Hillary’s people are deeply worried. Yet, there are some very interesting issues raised by people who are rather serious and even sensitive, (see this by Stanley Crouch, for example) having to do with his immigrant father and white mother. Why should the white mother be less of an issue than that his father is from Kenya? The point, according to Crouch, will revolve around this: "Other than color, Obama did not - does not - share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves." I mean to watch how this plays out, and not only because there is an outside chance that Obama can stop Hillary, or, because Obama may well be just preparing himself for a run in 2012.
By the way, I just started reading Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas.
I admire Crouch but, though it is not his main point, he here perpetuates a simplistic idea of African American history. Not all African Americans are descended from slaves, and not all slaves worked on "plantations." African American history is not in any simple way coextensive with slavery: there were from the beginning free blacks in North America, something like a half million on the eve of the Civil War. And "plantation" is misleading as a description of the circumstances of a large proportion of the enslaved population. Such facts do not of course make slavery any less horrible.
Does it matter if Obamessiah stops Hillary? No. Their politics are the same.