It's OK to vote for Obama because he's black

I'm voting for Obama because he's qualified, charismatic and progressive -- but his blackness seals the deal.

By Gary Kamiya

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Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Race, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War, Barack Obama, 2008 election

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Salon composite

Feb. 26, 2008 | I admit it: I'm voting for Barack Obama because he's black. Yes, I'm voting for him because he's qualified, intelligent, charismatic and competent -- and because unlike Hillary Clinton, he opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. But if he weren't black, and Hillary had opposed the war, I'd probably vote for her because of her greater experience. In any case, it's a moot point, because if Obama weren't black, he would not be the Democratic front-runner.

I believe that most of Obama's supporters are voting for him for the same reason. Like me, they're drawn to his idealism, his youthful energy, his progressive politics. But it's his blackness that seals the deal.

And that's OK. In fact, it's wonderful.

There's a lot of resistance to this idea, and a lot of discomfort about even expressing it. In online discussions, many whites vehemently deny that Obama's race played any role at all in their decision to support him. They insist that his color doesn't matter, that they decided to support him simply because he's the best candidate.

This reaction is understandable. It feels more racially enlightened. To baldly proclaim that you support Obama because he's black seems to diminish his real qualities and achievements -- his stellar academic career, his work in the urban trenches, his liberal voting record, his ability to inspire. Foregrounding Obama's ethnic heritage implies that you're unhealthily obsessed with race, and make artificial decisions based on it. It can be seen as patronizing, as a merely sentimental, pie-in-the-sky gesture.

Unable to directly challenge Democratic voters' race-driven enthusiasm for Obama because that would make her look racially insensitive, Clinton's attacks on Obama as a false messiah covertly echo this theme. "Now I could stand up here and say, 'Let's get everybody together, let's get unified, the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing,'" she said sarcastically Sunday in Rhode Island. "'And everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect.'"

Neocon pundit Bill Kristol, whose unerringly wrong track record on Iraq earned him a spot on the New York Times' Op-Ed page, joined Clinton in bashing Obama as a bogus messiah (also without mentioning race). In his Monday column, Kristol wrote, "[T]he effectual truth of what Obama is saying is that he is the one we've been waiting for."

Some critics who directly acknowledge the racial nature of Obama's appeal have argued that the wave of white support for Obama bespeaks not a genuine desire to bridge the racial divide but a bad-faith attempt to escape into some post-racial never-never land. David Ehrenstein, who is black, wrote a widely discussed column last year in the L.A. Times in which he argued that Obama's appeal derives from his role as the "Magic Negro," a benign, unthreatening figure who suddenly shows up to offer racial absolution to mildly guilty whites. "The less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes," Ehrenstein writes. "If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him."

Some conservatives, not surprisingly, have blasted the racial component of Obama's white support, seeing it as a kind of affirmative action for undeserving minorities. A post on the right-wing site Townhall.com excoriated Democrats for treating the campaign like an affirmative action program, handing a "completely unqualified" candidate the nomination "because he's part of a minority."

Next page: White enthusiasm for Obama is driven by his race

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