Stanley Crouch has a column in the Daily Beast today arguing that any black person who says they don't know someone like Obama is a liar:
A recent bit of fakery was made clear to me by a young black writer who pointed out that he knew a good number of black people who said of Obama that he was not like any of the black people whom they knew or who resided in their neighborhoods. I told him that I thought he was being told a damn lie. A guy who is from a solid black middle class background and believes almost anything he hears from black people who claim to have been born in a barrel of butcher knives (and perhaps shot in the ass with a pair of Colt .45s), he wanted to know why I thought his friends were not telling him the truth.
I said to him that those were people who had obviously heard someone say that on television and had begun repeating it, as many people are prone to do, especially if the result is something crudely inaccurate and stupid about the "black experience." Either that or they had never been literally let out of a box while they supposedly grew up in somebody's projects in some asphalt jungle somewhere.
Stanley Crouch, November, 2006:
So when black Americans refer to Obama as "one of us," I do not know what they are talking about. In his new book, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama makes it clear that, 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.
Addendum, December 3, 2008:
[Stanley Crouch] is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign.
Hopefully he'll get around to reading Dreams From My Father at some point.
--A. Serwer
