Black, but Not Like Me?

Black, but Not Like Me?

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US political darling Barack Obama has received enthusiastic support for a possible 2008 presidential bid -- except from fellow African-Americans, a group many believed would be among his staunchest backers.

Oh, really now?

I am always amazed at the five or ten black people that get to speak for ALL blackfolks. Stanley may well be a nice enough fellow but I don't know him or his people so his opinion? As representative of mine as Condi's hair helmet is of my own luscious 'do.

To be fair, I have seen this cautious optimism and borderline disdain for Obama first hand, but this story in no way captures why so many of us feel the way we do. There are several factions at work in our communities.

There are the old-schoolers who think "black politics" have to be combative and monolithic to be effective. Most of those folks owe their own jobs and livelihoods to that kind of sheepherding loud talking so that is to be expected. They are a dying breed and they don't have my vote to sell for a cushy job anymore so I find them irrelevant.

Then you have those self-hating blackfolks, very much like the Uncle Rukus character from the Boondocks comic strip, who don't understand why us darkies always got to cause so much trouble seein' how nice massa been to us'n. They are sad and funny kind like a fatal car crash is funny and should be prevented from voting by lethal injection if necessary, but they are no threat.

I've seen the faction of us who want Obama to "prove" something to them. They are distrustful of anyone that adored, that respected by the majority culture. These tend to be the same people who do not ask for the same level of proof from white elected officials. This is the "ghetto pass" mentality -- they want Obama to engage in some political dis track reminiscent of Nas and Jay Z so they can find him "genuinely black." Think: folks who actually know what the Chicken Noodle Soup dance is...and do it. Not my kind of folk, not because they don't love Obama but because they have a different threshold established for him than for his white counterparts.

Finally, I think there is a large group of black people who have lived long enough or studied enough history to know that getting your hopes up as a person of color in this country is a recipe for major disappointment. So they refrain from discussing this matter in mixed company, lest the whitefolks catch on to how we really feel and use it as a weapon to destroy the brother.

These are the same folks who know enough conspiracy theories have proven to be true, and so they worry Obama's safety and will believe it -- the possiblity of a black man in the White House -- when they see it. They are not disdainful of Obama but of a white dominant culture who makes sport of elevating people in general, black folks in particular, to exalted positions only to knock them down like a lifeless pinata.

In the end, the media and pollsters have yet to discover that we are not a monolithic group of people. Stanley Crouch no more speaks for me than Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly. Shared skin color do not a shared political ideology make.

But, as always, when presented with the choice of the devil we know and the devil we don't know, I'm betting we'll choose the devil that looks more like family.