Stanley Crouch, 2011:
The game is now getting old. The last straw may have come when West told the website Truthdig, "My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men ... As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white .... He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination."
How now, brown cow?
It fell to Melissa Harris-Perry, who has been a colleague of West's at Princeton as well as a columnist for The Nation, to take him down on MSNBC last week by rebutting his comments and saying that they "smacked of birtherism." Black-themed websites were abuzz with Harris-Perry's cool dismissal of the huckster.
Stanley Crouch, 2006:
Why then do we still have such a simple-minded conception of black and white - and how does it color the way we see Obama? The naive ideas coming out of Pan-Africanism are at the root of the confusion. When Pan-African ideas began to take shape in the 19th century, all black people, regardless of where in the world they lived, suffered and shared a common body of injustices. Europe, after all, had colonized much of the black world, and the United States had enslaved people of African descent for nearly 250 years.
Suffice it to say: This is no longer the case.
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.
Black public intellectuals used to make a sport out of excommunicating the unworthy from blackness. In the age of Barack Obama, that's just not as cool as it used to be.
