The Identity Card

The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white mother and a black father. I heard this over and over again, never in a snide or gossipy way, always matter-of-factly. Apparently this was the way we Americans had to introduce Obama to each other. For some reason, knowledge of his racial pedigree had to precede even the mention of his politics--as if the pedigree inevitably explained the politics.

Of course, I am rather sensitive to all this because I, too, was born to a white mother and a black father, though I did not fully absorb this fact, which would have been so obvious to the outside world, until I was old enough to notice the world's fascination--if not obsession--with it. To this day it is all but impossible for me to actually stop and think of my parents as white and black or to think of myself, therefore, as half and half. This is the dumb mathematics of thinking by race--dumb because race is used here as a kind of bullying truth that pushes aside the actual human experience.

Racist societies make race into a hard fate. So people who are the progeny of two races become curiosities not because they are particularly interesting, but because they are so unexpected. This must be an old and tiresome vulnerability in Barack Obama's life (as it is in mine), and all the more so because he has chosen a public life. One senses that his first book, Dreams from My Father, was meant to diffuse some of this vulnerability. In it he does not merely own up to his interracial background as if to a past indiscretion; he candidly explores it. And his brave self-disclosure succeeds because we no longer live in an America that wants to make mixed-race people into pariahs. That was once done to keep firm the racial boundaries of American apartheid--the mulatto's tragic exile standing as a cautionary tale meant to keep people "with their own kind." But today's mixed-race person is "fresh," a word that trails Obama like a nickname.

There is the unspoken hope that his mixed-race freshness carries a broader political originality. And, in fact, he does embody something that no other presidential candidate possibly can: the idealism that race is but a negligible human difference. Here is the radicalism, innate to his pedigree, which automatically casts him as the perfect antidote to America's exhausted racial politics. This is the radicalism by which Martin Luther King Jr. put Americans in touch--if only briefly--with their human universality. Barack Obama is the progeny of this idealism. As such, he is a living rebuke to both racism and racialism, to both segregation and identity politics--any form of collective chauvinism.

Thus, the cultural and historical implications of Obama's candidacy are clearly greater than its public policy implications. While Obama the man labors in the same political vineyard as his competitors, mapping out policy positions on everything from war to health care, his candidacy itself asks the American democracy to complete itself, to achieve that almost perfect transparency in which color is indeed no veil over character--where a black, like a white, can put himself forward as the individual he truly is. This is the high possibility that the Obama campaign points to quite apart from its policy goals.

The Struggle to Belong

And yet the issue of race, so nicely contained and deactivated in the Barack Obama political persona, is still very much alive within the man himself. Today's black identity has been nearly a life-long preoccupation for Obama. By the surface facts of his life--mixed-race background, childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia--it would be easy to assume that he might be indifferent to the whole business of race and identity. Many Americans want to believe that there are people on whom race sits very lightly, people whose very hybridism suggests the possibility of transcending race.

But Barack Obama is not such a person. His books show a man nothing less than driven by a determination to be black, as if blackness were more a specific achievement than a birthright. This drive puts Obama at odds with his own political persona. Much of the excitement that surrounds him comes from the perception that he is only lightly tethered to race. Yet the very arc of his life--from Hawaii to the South Side of Chicago--has been shaped by an often conscious resolve to "belong" irrefutably to the black identity.

What sort of alienation drives this resolve? When, at the age of 2, Barack Obama was abandoned by his African father, he lost both a father and accessibility to a black identity--not necessarily a politicized identity but that much simpler and more profound feeling of unselfconsciously belonging to a people. Here was a kid, accountable in the world as a black, being raised by whites--mother, grandmother, and grandfather. Nothing in the world wrong with this. In fact, the fine young man that Obama became has to be credited in large part to the devotion of his extraordinary mother--a woman who, in Indonesia, got her young son up at 4 five days a week to run him through English lessons before his Indonesian school day even began. And yet absences, like father and race, can quite irrationally open up deep--almost insatiable--longings.

So after college Barack Obama spent three years as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. I spent my first three years after college in the late '60s working in Great Society programs in East St. Louis, Ill. These were encounters with deep, seemingly intractable, black poverty. And I am sure that Obama, like me, was motivated by a genuine desire to do something good. But on another level these were also very likely quests for racial authenticity--for a resolution of that peculiar alienation that trails mixed-race people, that absence of a simple racial solidarity that is the easy birthright of others. When Obama is about to leave Chicago for Harvard Law School, he wonders: "Was that all that had brought me to Chicago, I wondered--the desire for such simple acceptance?"

So, yes, Obama's interracial background puts him at cross purposes. It gives him a racelessness that is politically appealing to whites, but it also draws him toward precisely the kind of self-conscious black identity that alienates whites. For nearly two decades Barack Obama has attended a black church on the South Side of Chicago that his own mother could never have felt comfortable in. It subscribes to a "Black Value System" in which "black" was always the operative word--"black family," "black community," "black freedom," etc. But it was not a black value system that accounted for Obama's success in life; it was the values of his white Midwestern mother. Could he stand up in his own church and say this?