Kenneth J. Cooper

Some African Americans think Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., isn’t really black. Anyone with unimpaired vision can see that he is. A couple of contrarian commentators and other folks are trying to read him out of the race because of his mixed parentage and his childhood spent in distant places.

His father was a black African, his mother a white American, and he lived in Hawaii and Indonesia with white grandparents as a child, his critics point out. All facts — but they don’t erase his racial identity.

What troubles commentators Stanley Crouch, Debra J. Dickerson and others is that Obama may have had no ancestors who were slaves and didn’t experience segregation or the fight for civil rights, according to a recent article in the New York Times.

Debates about who is an “authentic” black rarely have any merit. This one is particularly mindless and pointless.

People who identify themselves as African American are disassociating themselves from someone who is half African. What sense does that make? It used to be “one drop” of black blood made you black. Now being half black is not enough? Using that standard, the Census count of African Americans would plummet.

The Congressional Black Caucus has no doubts about Obama’s race and has accepted him as a member. There is no sensible reason for others to refuse to do so.

Since when did you have to be descended from slaves to be black? Slaves yearned to be free. They did not think that being enslaved defined who they were.

A man in the 21st century who embraces his blackness and whose ancestors may have been forever free should be celebrated, not dismissed from the race. Not that it matters, but it may be that not all of Obama’s forbears were free. Through the 1800s, Arabs conducted a slave trade in East Africa, including Kenya, where his father was born.

It is illogical to assert that to be black you have to have lived through segregation and the civil rights movement. What about young people born after those eras?

Ronald Walters, an eminent political scientist, appeared to lump Obama together with “people who come into the country.” Dickerson, in an essay for the Salon.com webzine, flat out calls the senator “an immigrant.” To give the story a common-man touch, the Times even quoted a Washington, D.C., barber who mistakenly claimed that Obama is “from another nationality.”

Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961. Hawaii became a state in 1959. That makes the senator an American by birth, and thus eligible to be president under the Constitution.

Clearly, it’s absurd to assert that Obama is not black because his father was from another country. Nobody disputes these people are black: Malcolm X, whose mother was born in Grenada; Louis Farrakhan, whose mother was from St. Kitts and whose father was from Jamaica; or the late congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, whose mother was from Barbados, and whose father was from Guyana. How about Stokely Carmichael — Mr. “Black Power,” born in Trinidad — or Marcus Garvey, the Pan-Africanist from Jamaica? Were they not black?

You can be the child of immigrants, or an immigrant yourself, and be black too!

That Obama once lived in a far-flung place like Indonesia does not affect his race. What about the children of African American diplomats, executives or missionaries who live abroad and often attend fancy private schools in the host countries? Are those children not black?

Crouch and Dickerson apparently define being black as a condition of deprivation and struggle. The problem with that narrow definition is that African Americans won’t be black any longer once equality is achieved.

There is no logic in disputing the race of the only black U.S. senator at the moment, just the fifth one ever, who is popular and launching a plausible campaign for the presidency. How does this muddled criticism advance black political empowerment?

There are legitimate questions to be raised about Obama’s experience, temperament, worldview and stance on the issues of the day. There is no question about his race.

Kenneth J. Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a freelance journalist based in Boston.