House Editorial: Running campaigns on race puts black men in boxes
Whether Barack Obama is ‘black’ enough to run as a black man for the White House should be irrelevant to his run for the White House
Posted on February 19, 2007

For the first time in U.S. presidential history, there is a black candidate with a legitimate chance to win.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., announced his candidacy last week, but almost as soon as Obama went presidential, everyone went racial — especially the black community.

Obama has been criticized for not being black enough, with the main rap on him being he isn’t descended from African slaves brought to America. Obama instead has more recent ties to the continent, as his father is a Nigerian immigrant. So while his African heritage is strong, for some blacks in America, it isn’t the right kind of heritage.

The question is: why does this matter?

The answer is: it doesn’t.

To paraphrase Ron Burgundy: It’s kind of a big deal that a black man has a shot at the White House. Blacks have run before (Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson), but neither of them generated the kind of enthusiasm and positive thinking seemingly intrinsic to all things Obama.

Saturday, Obama spoke in Richmond at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner — an annual fund raiser for the Democratic Party — to approximately 4,000 people at the Greater Richmond Convention Center. Tickets cost $165, and the event sold out in just three days.

To ask questions about “how black he is” only frivolously undermines the real point of all this. Early in the day, Obama and Gov. Timothy M. Kaine addressed a gathered crowd facing the state Capitol — the former Capitol Building of the Confederacy — in a move that was almost certainly planned to enhance his “blackness” in the eyes of those who don’t see him as the right kind of African-American.

The point is, who cares what color he is? To ask, “How black is he really?” ignores what really matters, and that is his would-be competency as a president. His degree of “blackness” more than likely won’t figure into many presidential decisions. His degree of “blackness” probably won’t make it onto the “to-do list” of cabinet meetings. And if it doesn’t matter in office, why should it matter on his way to office?

We spend a lot of time raising awareness and locked in diversifying embraces meant to point out how important differences are and celebrate what makes humanity unique, but the more one only looks for color, that’s only what one will see. And so it is with Obama.

For once, leave diversity, awareness, color, descent and politics out of the judgment of a human being. Instead, focus on the human being devoid of peripheral and cosmetic adjectives.

Obama may or may not be the golden boy he’s made out as; just let it be decided by his action, not his shade.