Posted by
flagwaver on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 11:10:37 AM
A few days ago I was talking to my mother on the phone, and the conversation turned to politics (an unusual topic for us), specifically what Barak Obama was all about. My mom wanted to know what was it that made Obama think that he was qualified to be President, and she wondered why it is that the Black establishment has not really warmed to him yet. Now I am going to tell you why I think that Obama-mania is not exactly sweeping the Black community.
Others have already noted and explained that Jessie Jackson and Al "Do" Sharpton are not on board with Obama because he represents a threat to them, and others feel that he has not paid homage to the leftist lean of the "civil rights" establishment. I must agree that Al and Jessie probably see him as a threat to their stranglehold on "black leadership", and I agree that Obama hasn't been as openly left as many other blacks in the government, like Maxine Waters or Elijah Cummings. But make no mistake, you do not rise that high in national politics as a Black Democrat without being left of center...Barak has just been able to camouflage it better than most!
I believe that the real reason that Barak has not really taken off in the Black community is that he isn't Black like me. What I mean by that is that Barak Obama does not have all of the cultural and racial legacies that Blacks born here in America have. While Barak may know of the Civil Rights Movement, and may have a great appreciation of it he does not really own it like we do. American Blacks were directly impacted by the movement and it may be hard for someone that had no real stake in it to truly understand the depth of the struggle.
Also, Barak is not from here, and that matters. There is a feeling that Barak is not really one of us, that he is from somewhere else and is trying to become one of us. His family history is different from the histories of most Black folks in this country; he has lived all over the world in several different cultures, while we have spent our lives trying to define just what out culture is as both Blacks and Americans. Obama just does not have that frame of reference of struggling to "find" himself in relation to the dominant culture in America that Black Americans do.
I guess what I'm getting at is that Barak Obama just seems foreign to many Blacks in this country, and it is hard for many of us to connect with him. He just seems too smooth, too packaged, too much of a political product for us to willingly embrace him. We all (black and white) like our politicians to have a human side, to have a few rough edges and Barak just doesn't have that. And that is why I think that he isn't going gangbusters in the Black community.
He's just not Black like me.