*African-American newspaper columnist Stanley Crouch wrote an article last month entitled What Obama Isn't: Black Like Me On Race. Radio host George Wilson, whose nationally-syndicated show reaches a cross-section of African-American listeners, said response to the Illinois senator so far has been "lukewarm."
The African American reaction to Barack Obama’s star presence and possible 2008 presidential run, if we are to believe Crouch and Wilson, pales in comparison to the outpouring of adoration given by white Americans. Our skin color may be the same, the journalists suggest, but not our 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 Crouch in his New York Daily News column, explaining that the first-term US senator -- the biracial offspring of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother -- does not share with most American blacks the painful legacy of slavery, repressive Jim Crow laws, 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. "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."
In other Obama news, a camera crew from freelance cinematographer Amy Rice has reportedly been shadowing the politician for months as the subject of a forthcoming documentary.
Fox.com columnist Roger Friedman wrote in his Thursday column: “Rice, from Oklahoma City, lost her brother David, an investment banker, in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Her brother Andrew Rice worked for the BBC out of Canada at the time.
But after Sept. 11, according to published reports, Andrew Rice became politicized. This year he ran as a Democratic candidate for the Oklahoma State Senate District 46 seat vacated by Sen. Bernest Cain — and won.
“What kind of makes Amy Rice’s story even more interesting is that apparently the knockout blonde’s backer on the project is said to be actor Edward Norton, the Oscar nominee and current star of ‘The Painted Veil.’”