For whites, Obama represents the hope

that this one Negro will absolve white guilt,

or he at least won't accuse "us"

of being responsible for racism

Though he is black, Obama reassures America

and its rulers that race is no longer an issue

Like the white-friendly media mogul and mass Obama marketer and ally Oprah Winfrey, Obama expresses and capitalizes on whites’ partial transcendence of “level-one” state-of-mind racism.

At the same time, he reassures them he will honor their refusal acknowledge and confront the continuing power of deeper, “level two” state-of-being” - societal and institutional – racism in American life.

Barack Obama is a Great White Hope. He is perfectly suited and crafted to wrap establishment corporate politics and the related American Empire Project in rebel’s clothing.

He advances the use of race (albeit in a new and “post-Civil Rights” kind of way) to advance the top-down business-class agenda.

Even the "Non-Racists" Are Racist

Obama's role is to assuage white "guilt" (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest.

Most white Americans yearning for a noble, healing Negro hasn't faded. We can go back to the first post-war 'good' black - Sidney Poitier - to understand how much whites need a respectable black to shore up their fear of the 'uppity' Negro.

Obama's famously stem-winding stump speeches have been drawing huge crowds to hear him talk of uniting rather than dividing. A praiseworthy goal.

Consequently, even the mild criticisms thrown his way have been waved away, "magically."

He used to smoke, but now he doesn't; he racked up a bunch of delinquent parking tickets, but he paid them all back with an apology. And hey, is looking good in a bathing suit a bad thing?

The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama's alleged "inauthenticty," as compared to such sterling examples of "genuine" blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg.

Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial "credentials" being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be.

Obama's fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he's written in his two (count 'em) books, or even what he's actually said in those stem-winders.

It's the way he's said it that counts the most. It's his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is "articulate."

His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn't called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media).

Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand.

For as with all "Magic" Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes.

If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.

Everyone's Favourite Uncle Tom

The remarkable success of power-respectful, bourgeois, non-threatening “good” blacks like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell helps white Americans believe that blacks have only themselves to blame on the whole for black America’s persistently separate and unequal status in the U.S.

For many whites, loving national media stars like Oprah and Barack is the nice reverse side of hating inner-city Darnell and Lakisha.

The sophisticated and opportunistic Obama knows this very well.

He’s not going to complicate his comfortable funding relationships with the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Henry Crown and Co. and General Dynamics et al by substantively criticizing empire and/or class inequality at home and abroad.

In a similarly calculating and power-seeking vein, he’s not about to undermine his favorable post-Civil Rights situation with the white electoral majority by making strong public reference to the persistently powerful and pervasive role of anti-black racism in American life.

He’s going to try to ride white America’s self-serving racial confusion and denial as far as he can — all the way, he hopes, to the White House.

“HE’S NOT ALL THAT BLACK”

Part of Obama’s appeal to white America has to do with the widespread Caucasian sense that Obama “isn’t all that black.”

Many whites who roll their eyes at the mention of the names of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton — former presidential candidates who behave in ways that many whites find too African-American — are calmed by the cool, underplayed blackness and ponderous, quasi-academic tone of the half-white, Harvard-educated Obama. Obama doesn’t shout, chant, holler or drawl.

He doesn’t rail against injustice, bring the parishioners to their feet and threaten delicate white suburban and middle-class sensibilities. He stays away from catchy slogans (like Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive”) and from emotive “truth”-speaking confrontations with power.

To use Joe Biden’s revealing terminology, Obama strikes many whites as “clean” and “articulate” — something different from their unfortunately persistent image of blacks as dirty, dangerous, irrational and unintelligible.

Obama has no moral or political obligation to shed his biracial identity, “multicultural” background and elite, private school education to “act [more classically and stereotypically] black.”

But whites’ racial attitudes are less progressive than might be assumed when their willingness to embrace a black candidate is conditioned by their requirement that his or her “blackness” be qualified.

Obama: The White Man's Sambo

Sometimes as Black people we get a better idea of what Black leaders are about, by listening to what our enemies have to say about them. Enter George F. Will, conservative columnist for the Washington Post.

On the next to last day of 2007, Will penned a column entitled, Misreading Obama's Identity. The Miami Herald reprinted it, titling the piece, "Obama; Dealing with Race fatigue." The Herald's title was more enlightening.

While many black people are confused about who and what Barack Obama represents, yet see him as the "hope" that he writes and talks so much about, the exceedingly white George F. Will is certain he knows the man.

To Will and his ilk, Obama represents the hope that this one Negro will absolve white guilt, or he at least won't ask anyone, or any entity ( government) to take responsibility for racism. Though he is black, Obama reassures America and its rulers that race is no longer an issue.

"He represents radical autonomy" explains Will. Reading between the lines, he's saying that Obama is one of "them," but he is not beholden to "them."

According to Will, "He [Obama] has chosen his racial identity, but chosen not to make it matter much."

"George F. Will contends that Obama's candidacy will actually free America from having to deal with race."

Will argues with his fellow conservative, Shelby Steele, who contends in his book, A Bound Man: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win, that Obama can't win, because his candidacy asks America to complete its maturation as a society free from the constraints of race.

While lauding Steele as "America's foremost black intellectual," the bow-tied right-winger contends that Obama's candidacy will actually free America from having to deal with race.

Will describes Obama as "a model of blacks' possibilities when they are emancipated from ideologies of blackness." So, according to Will, being "black" is an ideological choice.

George F. Will imagines himself an "Emancipator" of blacks from themselves - an insane proposition. We don't oppress ourselves, or choose to be discriminated against. We didn't make up our history, or the countless socio-economic indicators of the legacy of that history.

There is no such thing as an ideology of blackness. Even Negroes who don't want to be Negroes but have black skin, nevertheless are confronted at some point, with the fact that they are black.

Even Tiger Woods gets reminded occasionally that he is black, -- which is why a sportscaster could say that his black behind should be "lynched in a back alley." Even Obama has had his "experiences." He can run, but his skin won't let him hide.

According to Will, Obama's success refutes the theory of "social determinism" which, in Will's twisted mind, is the idea that "blacks are comprehensively and systematically held back by an oppression that is prevalent even - perhaps especially - when not apparent."

In other words, blacks are making it up. We have come through what some are calling the post-civil rights era and have "made it."

Therefore, any complaints about job discrimination, glass ceilings, poor schools, redlining, racial profiling, individual racist attacks, daily slights are just figments of our imaginations.

"We don't oppress ourselves, or choose to be discriminated against."

The truth be told, the supposedly "intellectual" Wills sounds just like the sophomoric and smug whites we meet in the workplace and on the internet, who accuse blacks of complaining for no reason and point to middle and upper class black progress as evidence that blacks no longer have reason to gripe.

"Quit your whining," they say. "I mean, you guys have Condoleezza Rice, Tiger Woods and now Barack Obama. What else do you want. I don't see no racism," they declare with absolute confidence - while themselves committing daily acts of petty racism and exclusion.

George F. Will, diagnosing himself and his fellow dull-witted bigots, says America is suffering from "race fatigue" - the "I don't want to hear about it" disease.

So "sick and tired" are those whites afflicted with "race fatigue," I think if some of them would shoot Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton if they thought they could get away with it.

But Obama is different than the blacks who so callously burden whites with constant complaints, says Will. "Obama seems to understand America's race fatigue."

Obama understands "the unbearable boredom occasioned by today's stale politics generally and the perfunctory politics theatrics of race especially."

Obama is the rare black man who has won Will's heart - a guy who tiptoes through electoral politics so well that enemies like George F. believe he is harmless on the racial front.

Will knows nothing about blacks, but he is quite familiar with many of his own people's deluded complaints, which he eagerly shares with the world.

Ironically, his praise of Obama is at the same time a curse, better not said out loud, lest it make African Americans rethink the actual effects on whites of Obama's public performances.