How Black is Barack Obama?

Every time I listen to Barack Obama—a daily practice—I feel like I'm listening to today's Martin Luther King, Jr. I'm waiting for the day that after the word "change" springs up one of the million times in each of his speeches, the words "So even though we face some difficulties of today and tomorrow..." follows. It's not because of their shared race, it is because Obama speaks in the same manner as King. He uses the same tone, oftentimes the same rhetoric as his predecessor in American political change.

But does sounding like the most prominent civil rights figure make you black? Race is a tough issue to tackle, not only because it is a sensitive topic but also because it is hard to conceptualize. Race is not a black and white thing (no pun intended), rather it is much more assigned based on our descendants and nation of origin. By all accepted social standards, Barack Obama is only half-black; he has a white mother and a black father.

Surely progressive thinkers have long passed the point where race should be taken into account in presidential elections. Still, the question arises: how black is Barack Obama? This question yields a second: why does it matter?

First thing's first: Barack Obama is not very black at all. His skin is darker than many people's but he does not sympathize with the majority of blacks in the United States. Most blacks don't have multi-million dollar mansions, most blacks don't get to run for President of the United States, most blacks didn't go to Harvard Law and, unlike Mr. Obama, most black males have to be especially worried that they will become just another number in the 1/3 statistic who end up in prison.

In that sense, Barack Obama is white as the fleece of Mary's little lamb. He didn't do crack when he was younger, he did cocaine. Rich, white people get to do cocaine, that's why there is the controversial crack versus cocaine mandatory minimum disparity. This has nothing to do with a Caucasian mother, this having everything to do with his privileges.

Black revolutionary (and inspiration for Malcolm X) Franz Fanon once famously wrote in his book 'The Wretched of the Earth' "you are rich because you are white and you are white because you are rich." Obama himself falls into the latter half of the statement.

Indeed, Fanon's seemingly elementary theory holds absolutely true. For race is actually determined by socioeconomic status. The urban poor are heavily racial minorities, the elite are white. This is not happenstance, it's constructed by the elements of a classist system that inherently takes race into account. It is the blatant face of American capitalist inequality.

If President, Barack Obama will not represent the urban poor. Obama won't fix the prison-industrial complex, he won't spend his time tackling unfair drug laws and mandatory minimums and he won't try to stop classism in public and higher education. He will cater to the establishment that he preaches so heavily against because capitalism centers around capital and the President will always reflect the will of those who got him elected... monetarily.

If Barack Obama had dreadlocks and spoke in Ebonics he would not be where he is today. The public sees a dark white man, not a light black man. Everyone carries on about how the Democrats will either have a black man or a woman. The woman has barely embraced women's issues and ideals in her campaign, the black man has all but left the black disenfranchised (minus the fact that they vote for him en masse).

At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Colin Powell made a refreshing speech to the stereotypical elitist fat-cats of the Republican Party. He discussed the urban poor and made statements such as "We either build our children or we build more jails. Time to stop building jails." and "...some in our party miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand black kids get an education but hardly a whimper is heard from them over affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax codes with preferences for special interests."

That's the contemporary Army man I want as my establishment candidate. That's who I want to be the first black United States President. Because change isn't about taking the black out of the black man in Washington, it's about the black man putting the black in Washington.

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