"We're gonna move on up one by one
We ain't gonna stop until the job is done
Can I say am I black enough for ya
Am I black-a black-a black enough for ya?"
-- Billy Paul
Next to 'Me and Mrs. Jones', that was my favorite song on 'The 360 Degrees of Billy Paul', the first LP I ever owned. I was in the 6th or 7th grade and I used to sing that song to my schoolmates who had no freaking clue what I was talking about. It didn't matter to me. I was black enough. I knew the melody and the lyrics not only for Billy Paul but for Curtis Mayfield too.
When Oklahoma Republican JC Watts interviewed on the Chris Rock Show, he famously made an ass of himself because he didn't recognize the lyrics to a George Clinton song. All of us cool blackfolks declared Watts, a good guy, but woefully square and out of touch. In many ways it was his political death knell, at least among those I would tentatively call the 'bicoastal black bourgeoisie'. If you're one of us college educated, civil libertarian blackfolks with a sense of style and humor who understands and uses the phrase 'flyover country', death at the hands of Chris Rock is death indeed. This is the kind of death Barack Obama shows signs of showing, but for a slightly different reason.
I've only read the slightest bit of Obama's self-mythologizing best-seller, but I've seen enough to recognize that like JC Watts, he doesn't come from an immediately recognizable backstory. He's not an existential archtype and he doesn't pretend to be (thus far in the book). But everybody expects some obeisance to that when you're telling your black American story. Colin Powell had some, Brent Staples had some, Henry Louis Gates Jr had some. Some what? Some down home with ma and pa, or some inner-city grit. When you don't have that, ethnic black America doesn't love you. You gotta have some Color Purple love or some NWA love. You gotta have some Eyes Were Watching God or some Poppa Was a Rolling Stone to fit into the playbook. Just like we know Mitt Romney is going to trot up his family and stand in front of the Red White and Blue bunting, just like we know Hillary Clinton is going to do her brainy girls' school thing, all the candidates that work their way into American hearts have to run along lines we know. Obama has a question mark.
Obama's question mark is familiar to me. It is the black suburban question mark, and there are plenty of examples of talented blackfolks who have had to deal with that same question mark. And there are unfortunately only a few ways to play it. In my generation, America is not quite dealing with it well and that's why you have to play it - you can't just leave it alone. The black suburban question mark goes back to the fundamental monolithic question of politics and society. You're new, you're dark. You look like you could be successful in the mainstream, but what do you really want? Are you really like us or are you really like them? Blackfolks and whitefolks both ask this question. It's a question of loyalty. And they infer an answer from your tone of voice or your walk or your taste in music. If you get the question mark, you have to prove something. It's a monkey on the back. John McWhorter had it. Marcus Mabry had it. Trey Ellis had it. Joseph C. Phillips had it. Bobby Rivers had it. Tiger Woods had it. David Robinson had it.
There's really only one way to win, and that is to give both 'sides' a reason to claim you, a reason to believe that your glory is their glory. Sometimes you can do that but still be too black or too white. Whoopi Goldberg is a perfect example. Blacks and whites respect her but she's still too black to get automatic white love. You couldn't elect Whoopi to anything without love. Darius Rucker is another example. Black as he looks, most blackfolks don't claim him, and they never will. He's still too white to love. Sometimes you can win by disappearing into America, and becoming iconic of American love. That's what we all love the best. You could become a Michael Jordan. You could become an Oprah. When it comes to politics and racial loyalty and love there are two styles at the top of the black leadership foodchain. There is the Colin Powell and there is the Muhammad Ali.
Politically, many blackfolks still hunger for an Ali, somebody whose talk makes whitefolks uncomfortable but whose position and power cannot be denied. It is, for better or worse, a sign of political integrity. But short of having that, blackfolks will settle for someone whose feels racial pain. For every black public figure in America today some balance is struck that endears them to the black body politic. Their acceptance comes through a combination of underdog empathy and arrogant pride given by blackfolks. They have their 'blackness moment' We know it when we see it, and the loyalty flows one way or another. That deciding moment of blackness is sometime initiated by the candidate themselves, sometimes it is thrust upon them. But one way or another, it always comes, and nobody is quite satisfied until it does. Sometimes it take a little bit of white racism to satisfy this loyalty test, sometimes it takes a lot. A host of older black politicians got black love because they did that Ali thing. Harold Washington. David Dinkins. Andrew Young. Sharpe James. Marion Berry. Blackfolks loved them because they had power and they made whitefolks mad. It worked.
Understand that black political love is a different thing than respect. I say black and white respect run identically. We respect folks for the same reasons. Although blacks might never love Clarence Thomas, they'd certainly respect him more if his reputation as a jurist if he wrote the deciding opinion more often. Blacks respect Dr. Rice more, because she tells the classic black overachiever story. But she doesn't get much love.
When there are black candidates who get a standard measure of respect for their talents and abilities, it all comes down to love. That's especially poignant when there are black candidates who can crossover, and it's downright critical for those who garner the question mark. Alan Keyes gets no love because whitefolks don't hate him enough and the 'wrong' kind of whitefolks love him too much. Harold Ford got some love because the spectre of miscegenation was supposedly raised against him, but he didn't get that love before.
So here we have Barack Obama, a Democrat in the mold of Paul Simon who must in the course of his campaign face the question mark and his blackness moment. While the very fact of him running for President gives many in the black polity the only reason they need, it is not enough. He will have to add to the measure of respect he gets now, some measure of love. For Obama, I say that it has to be Colin Powell love as opposed to Muhammad Ali love. When Powell stood up for Affirmative Action on the floor of the GOP Convention, he got booed, but everywhere blacks knew that he got more love from the African American electorate. We accepted that tiny bit of victimhood as loyalty, and it was enough. Obama already has the black suburban question mark, so he has to earn his inner city and blue collar bones. He'll do so in the same vein as white liberals, not through the black man existentials, but through civil rights credentials. Nobody expects Obama to shave his head and wear a moustache and goatee and even bother to look like an average black man. He has that much to prove.
The 'articulate' moment provided by Joe Biden was just the prelude.
We all could expect that. That's not a curveball capable of defining
Obama for the purposes of black love. He needs something more. And
something tells me that he's not going to start it, he's going to
finish it. I say Obama's moment will be found in his reaction to some
racial event in America sometime between now and election day. He'll
use the same words that Bill Clinton might use, but he'll say it
blackly, and the whoops from the crowd will be pronounced. That moment
will make Obama vice-president.
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