Reflections on Color in Barack Obama's First 100 Days

Reflection on Barack Obama’s first 100 days may be anappropriate time to recall a discussion that transpired between Jack Hunter and Paul Gottfried shortly before the president’s inauguration.

These two self-declared “paleoconservatives” had an exchange over the extent to which racial considerations had informed the adulatory mood that had swept blacks over the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Gottfried claimed that Obama’s race figured minimally or, at the very least, secondary to his political orientation. Hunter seemed to think that it was the president’s race primarily that accounted for black America’s euphoria.

Both Gottfried and Hunter were partially correct. This, however, means that they were both partially incorrect as well. Interestingly, the root of their conflict lies in their agreement over the meaning of race.

Usually, race is spoken and thought of as merely a biological phenomenon. When Hunter asserted and Gottfried denied that blacks’ enthusiasm for Obama was attributable to the latter’s race, this was the sense in which they were using the term. Yet for a significant number of people, and for an arguably even greater number of blacks, this isn’t the most meaningful, let alone sole, sense of the term.

Race is biological, yes, but it is just as importantly ideological. It is this conception of racial identity that informs the insistence on the part of many blacks, especially the self-appointed guardians of racial orthodoxy, that individuals of African descent who expressly relate to the policies and ideas of the GOP and conservatism generally are not “authentically” black.

This ideologically-oriented account of race also explains why Republican blacks like Lynn Swann, Michael Steele, and Clarence Thomas elicit abysmal support from other blacks.

In short, Obama wouldn’t have garnered a fraction of the support among black voters that he in fact received had he not been successful in styling himself “authentically black.” But the realization of such an objective required that he unapologetically own a robust, left-wing (i.e., “welfare-statist,” “socialist”) vision.

From the standpoint of our racially-correct orthodoxy, racial identity is never merely a matter of color.