The field house at Iowa State University in Ames was jammed to the rafters with people, most of them white, who seemed genuinely excited to see Barack Obama. About 24 hours had passed since the junior senator from Illinois had told the world that he, too, was in it to win it, and to transform the country.
Among the enthusiasts was Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who went to the podium and endorsed Obama a full year before the Iowa caucuses. Miller has been attorney general for 24 years, and knows how to get votes in Iowa. All of which put together says: this Obama thing might be a serious candidacy after all.
Obama was his dazzling self, skipping deftly from the funny explanation of his "funny name" ("people ... wouldn't say it right: They would call me 'Alabama' or 'Yomama.' My father was from Kenya that's and that where I got my name. My mother was from Kansas, and that's where I got my accent.") to the need for expanded production of bio-fuels to reduce our dependence on foreign oil -- with Iowa and Illinois corn, of course.
Near the end of the speech, however, he started talking about a trip he took to Cairo, Illinois, while he was running for the Senate. He tells the audience, for the sake of context, that Cairo was once known for its troubled racial climate and then for its violent race riots. It had all the build-up of the kind of racially charged, eye-opening story one might hear from a black politician -- a black person -- anywhere in America. Such a story would include a mention of the small, tell-tale slight or rank injustice that unveils a rancid side of American life.
In this story, Obama goes to Cairo with Dick Durbin, the other Democratic senator from Illinois, and on the drive there, Durbin recounts how scary Cairo used to be; how as a young lawyer, Durbin came face to face with the White Citizens Council in the form of a warning not to use his hotel phone because the hotel operator was a member and would report back. You know what's coming: a snapshot of a very dark time in American history and one black person's passage through it.
In this story however, that's not what happens. That is not Barack Obama's story and it is not Barack Obama's politics – which is precisely what has given rise to the recent questions about whether he is "black enough."
Made nervous by Durbin's tale of the old Cairo, Obama is surprised when the two of them pull into the site of his campaign rally and find the place packed with cars and a warm welcoming crowd -- most of which is white. "We looked at each other because we were thinking the same thing," Obama said in Ames, "If you had told him 30 years ago that he [Durbin], the son of Lithuanian immigrants, would be coming back here as the senior senator and bringing me, an African American, along as the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate, no one would have believed it. No one."
Heart-warning, inclusive, all-American. The bad, racial-hatred part of the story never comes. Obama's emphasis is not on the horrors of the past injustice but on a kind of human decency that transcended it. And it is exactly this lack of grievance in Obama's politics that has made some call his "blackness" into question.
Is Obama black enough? The answer, of course, is yes (though it is not at all clear what a requisite level of blackness is supposed to qualify him for). The question and answer meet at the same absurdist/simplistic place where so many conversations about race end up, but it does rub up against something very real in this way: One way some black people have defined themselves is how they deal with white people -- or how they don't deal with them.
This is a natural historical consequence of everything awful from slavery to Jim Crow, and much of the racial debate since then has been about correcting wrongs and fighting injustice. With some of the most effective politics in all of human history, the civil rights movement changed the world. For African Americans, the list of injustices remains long and scandalous, and much of "black" politics over many generations has been an ongoing and endless effort to address and redress those injustices. And for some, the magnitude of the successes has not quenched the thirst for the fight.
For them the real question for Obama is, "If you're black, why aren't you mad?" But he is not going to be the grievance candidate in this election: It's not an Obama thing.
Back in 2004, in a rickety campaign office not far from the Old State Capitol where he laid out his lofty vision for the country last week, Obama told me that his outlook on race would certainly have been different had he spent his formative years in the racial cauldron of an American city like Chicago instead of in places like Hawaii and Indonesia. But that very fact may have allowed him to see and seek his place in the world outside the limited and limiting prism of American race relations.
"What I think serves me well is that I literally have a little piece of everybody in me. I'm black. I'm white," he told me back in 2004. "I have a sister who is half Indonesian. That gives me a level of empathy with people that is useful in politics."
What may be even more useful to us is this: If Obama survives the cauldron he has now entered, win or lose, his candidacy may move us definitively beyond idiotic questions like who black is enough, whatever that means, once and for all.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C. His weekly TAP Online column appears on Fridays.
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