Black?: Barack's Lack

I hate to ruin this love-in we’re all enjoying, but Barack Obama isn’t black.

First, Obama, unlike ideal black leaders like Louis Farakhan and Al Sharpton, doesn’t loathe and distrust white people. Where’s the anger? Where’s the indignation? Luckily, he’s a Democrat. If he were a Republican, Obama would be less black than even Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell.

Second, he’s only half-black. His mother was white. And as the Spike Lee faction will remind you every chance they get, half is definitely not full. Need an example? Take former Guns n’ Roses guitarist Slash. He’s half-black. And instead of being into rap or soul or funk or R&B, he’s into hard rock and plays a guitar. And when Slash was still in Guns n’ Roses, singer Axl Rose wrote the epithet “nigger” into a song and Slash didn’t quit the band. (Note: This doesn’t mean that the white side is more powerful. It simply means that, like the Dark Side of the Force, the white side is evil, more seductive, and can keep one from making the right decision.)

Some might argue that Jimmy Hendricks and Lenny Kravitz suggest that even “full” blacks can indeed be into rock without it diminishing their blackness. I’d argue that they’re the exceptions that prove the rule, but I don’t have to. They aren’t exceptions: Hendricks had a British accent, so he can’t really be black, and Kravitz is a Jewish name. You can’t be black if you have a Jewish last name. Just ask Farakhan.

Third, and most importantly, the black heritage Obama does have is faux. Even though he has lived his whole life with dark skin, and even though that would put him in the same psychological mindset as anyone else with darker-than-white skin, Barack Obama can’t possibly understand what it means to be black. He’s not black in the ways that count.

For your blackness to be black, you have to be a descendant of a West-African slave. If you’re a descendant of an African who wasn’t a slave, you’re simply an American of African descent. If you’re an African who moved to the States, you’re an African who moved to the States. If you’re from the Caribbean, I have no idea what you are.

But unless a distant relative of yours was whipped by a cracker-ass cracker, you’re not black, regardless of the size of your penis. As Debra Dickerson suggests in her piece that courageously points out Obama’s fake blackness, Obama is only “ ‘black’ as a matter of skin color and DNA”. Case closed.

The ideal, of course, is for everyone to live as One, with as few arbitrary divisions as possible, with humanity holding hands and sharing everything. But it remains important for minorities to create sub-divisions among themselves so that, for example, true blacks can ostracize fake blacks. This way, true blacks get a feel for what it was like for whites when they ostracized blacks. The more racial distinctions we make among ourselves, the closer we are to dropping racial distinctions and living as One.

Slowly, the world is starting to realize that your pigmentation doesn’t determine your worth as a human being. Now we must convince the world that your pigmentation doesn’t determine the color of your skin, either.