Black Enough?

Warning: There is poetry somewhere in this blog, but you are going to have to dig deep to find it…
The things I am reading and the things I am writing and the things I am doing are all making me think about America and Americanness. Recently I was asked in a public forum what were my thoughts on Barak Obama’s dilemma with African Americans. The person quoted the often used statement (not sure who came up with it, and I am not entirely convinced that black folks did) that Obama is not “black enough.” The implication being that Obama is not black enough to have automatic access to the black vote. It reminded me of Steve Harvey’s retort to another often used phrase: “You musn’t vote for Obama just because he is black.” Harvey’s question: “So what, I must vote for you just because you are white?” Think about it. It is actually a profoundly insightful and clever retort, as that has to be the only available conclusion one could reach. In other words, it is going to be about race if you bring it up, and since you have brought it up, you have to be saying that you want me to vote for a white person because that person is not black. But I did not use Harvey’s retort to answer the question. Instead I offered a statement that sounded on the surface counter-intuitive and wrong. Obama’s problem is not that people suspect he is not black enough, but that people fear he is not American enough. And by people, I mean first and foremost, black people. In other words, the reticence that some blacks feel about Obama is actually a kind of xenophobia, the worst form of patriotism that seems unlikely for a people who have fought so hard to be accepted as Americans in their own country. Still, it is a peculiar brand of xenophobia because it is one that emerges out of a myth of African America survival and triumph that has very clear dimensions—a distinctive narrative that is perhaps one of the most admired features of the American Dream. African Americans are uncertain about Obama because he represents a breach of one strain of the American Dream.

Where the American Dream of the immigrant has currency in Irish, Jewish, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Cuban, Dominican, and Mexican narratives of Americanness, it has no currency in the African American narrative. The journey from being a poor Polish immigrant in the early 1900s to becoming a being a great American economic powerhouse in 2000 is the journey of family that Americans embrace as the quintessential American Dream. But this narrative of the Dream is not the African American’s narrative. Slavery was so systematic in severing all the links with Africa, that African Americans became perhaps second only to Native Americans as genuinely American people with no real investment in the past, in the place of origin. Built into the struggle for freedom through slave rebellions, the fight against slavery, the Civil War, the post Civil War efforts at equality, the battle against Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement and the current efforts for political place in the American body politic has been, for the African American, a journey from slavery to freedom. Thus, in that Dream, the first black president of the United States would have to reflect that journey, would have to enact that myth. It has become difficult to see in Obama this narrative because his father is Kenyan. So the problem is not that Obama is not black enough, it is that he is too black, too African. On his mother side, there is no evidence of the narrative of slavery, and the absence of this from his father side—his position, therefore, as an immigrant, dismantles a very important part of the African American Dream in America. The implication is that he has not earned this. It is that a family that has had to make that journey is the one that has earned it. The problem is that he just came. He is a Johnny Come Lately. It is what so many blacks from various parts of the world have had to contend with in America for nearly a century. Marcus Garvey had to invoke his parallel slave narrative and the discourse of Pan Africanism to win follower to him in Harlem in the 1920s. Louis Farakhan has pretty much expunged his Caribbean connections in his narrative of identity, Stokley Carmicheal also wrestled with this dilemma, and some of the uncertainty about Colin Powell’s presidential flirtations came from this problem. But in each of these instances, the narrative of slavery, diaspora, and triumph through adversity existed and could be articulated and shared. Obama has a massive task to be so black in America. Which is why I think his theme song should be Peter Tosh’s great tune, “African”
Don’t care where you come from
As long as you’re a black man
You are an African
Don’t care your nationality
There is no partiality
You’re an African
And the fear is that if Obama is elected, an unstated prejudicial assumption about the ways of African Americans (as against recent black immigrants who, the largely wrongful stereotype offers, are more industrious, less concerned about race, a lot better at integrating into white society, etc.) will be confirmed. White folks want to forget about slavery, and Obama makes them not have to do that, the argument goes. This may seem petty, but what is less petty is the concern that without a narrative that allows the longstanding African American of many generations to enact the journey to equality, something will be lost in the way in which African American culture has functioned as the moral conscience of American society.
America’s most recent and immediate understanding of freedom is defined now by its understanding of what it denied to Africans in America. Americans understood the absence of freedom, the absence of fairness, the absence of just laws, the absence of humanity, the absence of tolerance and openness, the absence of liberty and balance in its dealings, through ts understanding of what it did to Africans in this country. Martin Luther King junior understood this along with so many others. He understood that his task was to help Americans redefine their Americanness by appealing to an ideal of fairness and rightness through their honest encounter with what they had done to the African in America over the centuries. Langston Hughes said in his poem “I, Too Sing America”, “besides they will see how beautiful I am”—he said they would be ashamed of what they have done once they are faced with the beauty of the African in America, and then, he continues, they wouldn’t “dare” send him back to the kitchen. Their fear is not, as we might want to think, of what the African would do to the white man in retaliation, but the fear is of what continued prejudice and bigotry would do to the white man after he has seen what he has done and seen the injustice of it. In other words, the very presence of the African American, and the basis upon which that African would engage America and be used by America is the most basic and yet most profound impact that Africa has had on America. Will an Obama presidency let white America off the hook? Will it allow people to forget the importance of that narrative? Will it, in essence, deprive the African America of an inheritance long fought for? And if so, will the symbol of Obama as president be an inadequate symbol of the triumph of America over its own bigotry and racism? To fail to choose Obama because he is not American enough would be a failure of another kind of idealism. This is the dilemma American faces.
Obama will be fine. He may well win, but I think I understand why there is some concern. No, people are not worried about his blackness, but about his Americanness, where America is defined for the African American in a distinctive way. But this is a dilemma that does not affect the average person. It only emerges when people have assumed the position of symbols. Obama has always been African American. His problems began only when he decided to run for president, and the president is a symbolic figure, a mythic figure around whom a distinctive narrative has been built. An Obama presidency would rewrite the narrative in interesting ways. As a poet, I find myself less bothered by this dilemma. I do because like Garvey and Marley and Tosh, I have long determined that failure to recognize first the collective truth of the African diaspora constitutes one of the greatest tragedies of colonialism and slavery—a tragedy that still haunts black people all over the world today. I like being Jamaican and I like being Ghanaian, but I have traveled around enough to know that my blackness offers a distinctive way to engage the world because it finds these intersecting narratives of struggle and survival among so many other black people around the world. Like all issues of race and identity, I know, this one, too, must change with time. And while my art draws on this truth, it also seeks to find in the midst of all of this, a human truth that will resonate with people everywhere.
I am not African American enough. This much I know. And as a poet I have to understand that. But I am black enough, and so is Obama. But black enough for what?