Barack Obama: The Audacity of Race

Is he black or is he biracial? Should Barack Obama be called the first black to win a major party nomination to become president of the United States?

The answer is - well - yes and no and it depends on who you talk to.

The questions about Obama's race, which started to peak in January and picked up steam during the controversy involving Obama's former Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright, popped up again earlier this month when he captured the presumptive Democratic Party nominee status.

Obama has talked extensively about parents, a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas. His maternal white grandparents helped raise him, especially when his mother became ill with ovarian cancer. Both of his parents have passed away.

He has also never been shy referring to himself as African-American and connecting himself to black community. His wife, Michelle, is African-American and a native of Chicago. His former church, which he recently left over a continued controversy in the media about its black theology, was majority African-American.

But before the Iowa Democratic caucuses when he was a virtual unknown, some African-Americans complained that he wasn't "black enough." Some pointed to the fact that he was not the descendant of black slaves and others said because he was raised by whites he didn't have an "authentic" African-American experience.

". . . When black Americans refer to Obama as 'one of us,' I do not know what they are talking about," said black New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch in his article in Nov. 2, 2006. ". . . Obama makes it clear that, while he has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own - nor has he lived the life of a black American."

Many African-Americans feel a kinship to Obama because of what is described as the One-Drop Rule. The rule, unwritten during slavery, became the law throughout the South during the Jim Crow Era to enforce segregation. It stated that if you had any African ancestry, regardless of your appearance, you were considered black.

For African-Americans, no matter how their ancestry tree grew, they were considered black, first and foremost. While the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the One-Drop Rule in 1967, it has done little to change how many Americans view race and people of multiple races.

"Back in the real world, Obama is married to a black woman," said Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates, of TIME magazine back in February. "He worked with poor people on the south side of Chicago and still lives there. That someone given the escape valve of biraciality would choose to be black, would see some beauty in his darker self and still care more about health care and public education than reparations and Confederate flags is just too much for many small-minded racists, both black and white, to comprehend.

"Barack Obama's real problem isn't that he's too white. It's that he's too black," Coates said.

Fred Harris, director of the Center for African-American Politics and Society at Columbia University in New York, told National Public Radio in January that an effort by Obama to shape himself as a biracial candidate might have alienated black voters, and possibly others.

"The candidate (would have) become invisible to his black roots," Harris said. "I think it would have turned a lot of voters off."

Harris told NPR he found it curious and another presidential candidate with multiracial ties, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, has not faced the same racial scrutiny that Obama has. Richardson is Latino and white.

Then, if you believe historian Leroy Vaughn, if Obama happens to win the White House in November, he wouldn't be the first person of color to do so. Vaughn told DiversityInc.com recently, that in debated research five other presidents - Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge - all had African ancestry.

If any of that is true is up for discussion, but wouldn't change the fact that if Americans chose Obama in his campaign against Republican John McCain, he will be the first to embrace himself as an African-American to win the White House.