Obamaflections

I'm the least qualified person to try to speak to this, but I wish someone would do it, so here goes.

Amid all the joy over Obama's inauguration, I've seen no mention of how remarkable it is that black America fully embraces Obama as theirs, sees his cause as theirs, fully owns this moment of triumph. That wasn't a foregone conclusion. Obama is not descended from any slaves, or people who suffered under Jim Crow, or civil rights marchers. He's really African-American, whereas the phrase is normally used as a weird euphemism for practically the most longstanding indigenous group in the country (except for aboriginal groups, I guess). And in many well-known ways Obama's story is more like that of an immigrants' kid than of the average black American (to the admittedly minimal extent that there is such a thing). At the start of the primaries, when Hillary was still leading among black voters in South Carolina, there were some muffled rumblings and grumblings about whether Obama was 'black enough', and it took a while for those to die away. He could easily have come to be identified as mixed-race first and foremost, and not really representative of anything but his urban elitist self.

So why didn't it play out that way? This is where it gets interesting, because there are two diametrically opposed answers:

1. It's all about race. Obama might not share the family history of most American blacks, but he shares the pigmentation, and that's what matters to them because it's still what matters for your life chances. It's what gets you excluded and stereotyped and stopped by the cops. Obama could have grown up Brazilian and his triumph would still be black America's triumph, because what it's a triumph over is just the centuries-long history of white racism in the U.S.

2. It's all about culture. Obama counts as fully American-black because black America is his adopted cultural home: he married into it, he goes to church in it, he lives in Kenwood, he listens to hip hop. (He even likes sweet potato pie, which I fear would be the dealbreaker for me.) He lives as an African-American, in short, and if that's what matters then the phrase isn't so stupid after all: all these cultural markers are just like the markers that we casually use to place some family as Italian-American or whatever.

Now I try to imagine a white man who had made all of Obama's choices, and assimilated as fully as possible to the black South Side. (I wonder if there are any....) How would black voters respond to that guy as a political candidate? I think there would be some feeling of solidarity, but obviously nothing like the reaction to Obama. So (1) can't be dismissed; and maybe it's really the heart of the matter. But I'm pretty sure (2) counted for a lot too. And that points to a future where pigmentation means less for identity than culture and culture is understood to be something freely adopted, as a mode of personal expression and self-development, open to all and none the less authentic for it. Bring it on, I say.