Word: racial
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that he had a white mother and a black father. I heard this over and over again, never in a snide or gossipy way, always matter-of-factly. Apparently this was the way we Americans had to introduce Obama to each other. For some reason, knowledge of his racial pedigree had to precede even the mention of his politics--as if the pedigree inevitably explained the politics...
...merely own up to his interracial background as if to a past indiscretion; he candidly explores it. And his brave self-disclosure succeeds because we no longer live in an America that wants to make mixed-race people into pariahs. That was once done to keep firm the racial boundaries of American apartheid--the mulatto's tragic exile standing as a cautionary tale meant to keep people "with their own kind." But today's mixed-race person is "fresh," a word that trails Obama like a nickname...
...carries a broader political originality. And, in fact, he does embody something that no other presidential candidate possibly can: the idealism that race is but a negligible human difference. Here is the radicalism, innate to his pedigree, which automatically casts him as the perfect antidote to America's exhausted racial politics. This is the radicalism by which Martin Luther King Jr. put Americans in touch--if only briefly--with their human universality. Barack Obama is the progeny of this idealism. As such, he is a living rebuke to both racism and racialism, to both segregation and identity politics--any form...
...working in Great Society programs in East St. Louis, Ill. These were encounters with deep, seemingly intractable, black poverty. And I am sure that Obama, like me, was motivated by a genuine desire to do something good. But on another level these were also very likely quests for racial authenticity--for a resolution of that peculiar alienation that trails mixed-race people, that absence of a simple racial solidarity that is the easy birthright of others. When Obama is about to leave Chicago for Harvard Law School, he wonders: "Was that all that had brought me to Chicago, I wondered...
...Area philanthropic network. Jones had the tough task of following Al Gore, who had delivered the keynote speech, but he still brought the house down. "When we bring together the best of the business community and the best of the tech community and the best of the racial-justice community, we'll get the coalition we always wanted." Even better, he adds, "we'll get the country we always wanted." In his vision, that means the map won't be divided between red and blue, but will be all green...