I voted for Obama. I celebrated his victory and I might just take the day off (or at least work from home) on Inauguration Day. But it took me a while to become comfortable with his campaign, in part because of the reasons Debra Dickerson articulated nearly a year ago.

I can’t and won’t revoke his membership in the American Society of Black Folks, of course. But I do think his heritage that is both black immigrant and Midwestern white gives him a perspective on life and on blackness that most black Americans — that is, those of us descended from Africans enslaved in the United states — don’t necessarily enjoy.

Barack Obama is “Black by Choice.” He is the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, which makes him racially black, though not culturally so. He was also raised by white folks from Kansas with stints in Indonesia and Hawaii. Have you checked the percentage of black Americans in Hawaii lately? That black Americans are almost non-existent in Indonesia doesn’t need to be stated.

Now Obeezy could easily have cultivated a distinctly bi-racial identity as so many bi-racial and bi-cultural children do. He easily could have cultivated an incidentally or accidentally black identity because of the demographics of the cities in which he was raised.

And yet, he chose to return to his African first name rather than be known as the far less foreign, far more familiar-sounding “Barry.” He chose to work as a community organizer on Chicago’s south side. He chose to attend a predominantly black church with a sort of crazy preacher. And he chose to marry a black woman from the south side of Chicago no less.

Because it was a matter of choice and not upbringing, Obama also had the freedom to choose which portions of black identity he wanted to claim. If I had to guess, I would say being black in mostly-white environment lead to some cognitive dissonance that allowed him to adopt some portions of a black American cultural identity (collectivism, social justice, and bou(r)gie Negro code-speak, for example) while eschewing the negative stereotypes of blackness.

And by crafting his own black identity and becoming president of the United States, perhaps Obama has — as so many other black immigrants and bi-racial blacks have — expanded our collective conceptions of what black is.

Related posts here

• Dear cousin Chris
• Dear Black Entrepreneurs (especially the ones behind Blackbird):
• In defense (um, sort of) of Geraldine Ferraro

Related content elsewhere

• The End of White America? from The Atlantic
• Black immigrants of the Caribbean: an invisible and forgotten community from Adult Learning on AccessMyLibrary.com
• Lisa D. McGill. Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation from African American Review on FindArticles.com

I don’t remember why the subject came up. But I do remember that you, with your 8-year-old earnestness, asked “Will there ever be a black president?” Do you remember that?

I remember we took a while to answer you. We were all trying to decide whether to tell you what we really thought, or tell you what you should tell an eight year old about his own possibility for greatness.

Your grandmother and my dad (his aunt) grew up in the segregated South. They remembered “colored” signs on rest rooms and water fountains. They remembered packing food on road trips to New York and Baltimore because they wouldn’t be able to find a restaurant that served Negroes until they got north of Virginia. My dad remembers being called a ‘nigger’ on more than one occasion both in South Carolina and Long Island, New York. Their cynicism was deeply shaped by lived experience.

I, on the other hand, had just finished four years of college. What little lefty, wide-eyed idealism I had was beat out of me by all of those electives I took about “intersecting oppressions,” “structural racism” and “cultural imperialism.” I had never been called a nigger to my face — though some of my black friends who grew up in white, northeastern neighborhoods had — but I was starting to feel and notice the impact of racism as a cultural belief. My cynicism was young, but still there.

So when you asked the question, we all thought about how to answer. Do we give you the answer that’s drenched in some unhealthy mix of cynicism and pragmatism? Or do we give you the answer that you should give an 8-year-old who is still able to dream big?

After what seemed like an eternity, your grandmother finally said, “Yes Chris. There will be a black president someday. It probably won’t happen in my life time. But it will in yours.”

I’m not sure any of us fully believed her answer at the time. And, no, she didn’t live to see it. But she was right about us seeing it.

Amazing isn’t it?

Love, Tiffany

By Canadian illustrator Marc Johns

By this time tomorrow, polls all along the east coast will be open and ready for citizens to cast their ballots. Roughly twelve hours later, we’ll start to get the nation’s first results in an election that is, for many reasons (starting with how f*ckin’ long ago the campaigning started), historic.

Most of the polls and projections I’ve seen has Obama squarely in the lead. But then I remember the shenanigans of the 2004 election. And I remember that people don’t always tell the truth in polls, and that poll results themselves can be flawed. And that chills me.

See, if Obama loses, I will be forced to believe one of the following scenarios:

1. My fellow citizens like to lie to pollsters and really do support trickle-down economics, unregulated markets, the privatization of everything, and endless war;
2. My fellow (white) citizens are so racist that they can’t vote for a black man, if it’s in their best interests; or
3. My country is essentially a capitalist dictatorship where people “vote,” but results are subject to tampering and therefore meaningless.

None of those scenarios sit well with me — particularly as a black woman who thought it would be another 30 years before it would even be possible to elect a black president — and I’m not sure what I’d do or believe in if, somehow, this election did not go Obama’s way.

Related:

• Blacks see hope, doubt in an Obama victory from the San Francisco Chronicle.
• If Obama Loses, Who Gets Blamed? from Slate.com

I might just vote for him. He says he’s a Libertarian, but he’s also quite progressive and I agree with him on many issues. Anyone who doesn’t take himself so seriously that he will learn and do the Soulja Boy in a campaign video has to be at least a little bit cool, right?

My comment was pretty much what I would have said in a blog entry, so I’m posting it here as well.

I think you’re right Dave. But I decided to cut GF some slack when she said that she was her gender was the deciding factor in the 1984 VP candidacy. It’s not that she couldn’t have done the job, she said, but she was chosen over other people because she was a woman.

Now where GF hangs herself with the rope the media handed her is that she doesn’t concede or acknowledge that Hillary is also where she is because she’s a woman and because, frankly, we still like Bill. GF then buried herself with the Oppressed White Person Defense.

But think about it: neither Clinton nor Obama are radical change-bringers. You could make the case that they’re the black male and the white female version of John Edwards (and I’m still not clear on whether Obama has a foreign policy and what that policy might be). They’re really both quite moderate and unremarkable in terms of policy.

But there is a whole lot remarkable about Obama’s blackness and Hillary’s gender. And I think Democrats are caught up in how cool that would be. I know I am, though in terms of policy, I’m much more in line with Kucinich.

That’s not to say that Obama (or Clinton) is unqualified or even less qualified. It’s to say “put 6 Democratic candidates in a bag and 5 would make a good president.” Where Obama and Hillary have an edge is that *physically* they look different from presidents 1 – 43.

And sometimes that’s what a country needs.

Related:

• Expertinent: The Political Psychology of Race and Gender (From Newsweek)
• When ‘Identity Politics‘ Is Rational (From The New York Times)