I also saw that those charged with analyzing the import of Obama's blackness were, in the main, working off of an old script. Obama was dubbed "The new Tiger Woods of American Politics," as a man who wasn't exactly black. I understood the point. Obama was not black as these writers understood black. It wasn't just that he wasn't a drug dealer like most black men on the news, but that he did not hail from an inner city, he was not raise on chitlins, his mother had not washed white people's floors. But this confusion was a reduction of racism's true breadth, premised on the need to fix black people in one corner of the universe so that white people may be secure in all the rest of it. So to understand Obama, analysts needed to give him a superpower that explained how this self described black man escaped his assigned corner. That power was his mixed ancestry.
( Ta-Nehisi Coates )
[ We Were Eight Years in Power: ]
www.QuoteSweet.com