Whites’ darling faces black barrier

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.

In contrast to the effusive reception Obama has received from white Americans, many US blacks so far have been cool, saying that while they may share skin color with Obama, they do not have a common culture or history.

"Obama did not -- does not -- share a heritage with the majority of black Americans, who are descendants of plantation slaves," wrote African-American newspaper columnist Stanley Crouch last month in an article entitled "Barack Obama -- Not Black Like Me."

Radio host George Wilson, whose nationally-broadcast talk show tests the opinions of a cross-section of African-American listeners, said response to the Illinois senator so far has been "lukewarm."

"He's not getting as much of an enthusiastic send-off from black people as he is from whites," Wilson said. Obama draws enormous, mostly white crowds, even though the first presidential primary election is more than a year away, and he is seen as a top contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But Crouch said that the first-term US senator -- the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother -- does not share with most American blacks the painful legacy of slavery and civil rights struggles.

"While he has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own -- nor has he lived the life of a black American," Crouch wrote in his New York Daily News column.

"If we then end up with him as our first black president, he will have come into the White House through a side door -- which might, at this point, be the only one that's open."

Political analyst Ron Walters said that Obama is a black whom many whites find reassuring, with his Harvard pedigree and law degree rounding out his half-European ancestry.

"If you take this in almost anthropological terms, there's a sense in which whites are more comfortable with blacks who they believe reaffirm them," Walters said.

He said other whites apparently view Obama not so much as a black trailblazer but as a multicultural figure, with his racially-mixed parentage and childhood spent in Hawaii and Indonesia.

African-Americans, however, who are accustomed to leaders who emerge from the civil rights movement, sometimes appear to struggle to relate to Obama.

"For some African-Americans, he has not really affirmed their identity. He has affirmed his own mixed identity, but he has not strongly affirmed the right and the claim of African-Americans in this society to equal treatment," said Walters, a professor at the University of Maryland.

Others said Obama is simply an unknown figure to many African-Americans who are almost reflexively suspicious. "There's a feeling that if white folks like him so much he must not be good for us. For some blacks it's a turn-off," said Wilson. If he does run, Obama would be the first African-American candidate for president who does not come out of the civil rights movement.

US Representative Shirley Chisholm, of New York, was the first African-American to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972.

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson was a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. A CNN poll last week found that 60 percent of Americans said they have no reservations about voting for a black president.