Is he ‘black enough’?: Time to get over it

By: Lawrence LamovecThe news: According to newspapers from coast to coast, many African Americans are asking: “Is Barack Obama black enough?”

Behind the news: Some have aimed this question at Obama because he is not the descendant of slaves, or because he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and graduated from Harvard University.

But Mary Pattillo, an associate professor of African-American Studies at Northwestern University, said millions of African Americans face similar questions. “It’s a whole combination of things. It’s skin color. It’s class. It’s exposure to interracial worlds,” Pattillo said. “This is not just about [Obama] being biracial at all. There are people who are light-skinned, and middle class, and went to a white school who have real challenges.”

More African Americans may be facing such questions in the years to come. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of people who indicated that they were African American and another race had grown nearly 7 percent compared to just 2.5 percent for the total population and nearly 1 percent for persons who indicated that they were only African American, according to U.S. Census estimates.

“In this country, because we are so color conscious, most people are identified by what they look like. We still categorize, subdivide and label,” said Dickelle Fonda of the Interracial Family Network, an Evanston-based group.

As for people questioning the “blackness” of Obama and other biracial African Americans, Fonda thinks people need to get over it. “[Obama] doesn’t have the history of slavery; does that make him less black? His father was an African. It doesn’t get blacker than that,” she said.