ALTHOUGH NOT quite able to pass for white, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has been able to pass for African American. He is biracial, but not white; black, but not African American; American but not African. What has entranced the country more than his somewhat vague policies is Obama's challenge to conventional racial and cultural categories.
Among African Americans, discussions about his racial identity typically vacillate between the ideologically charged options of "black" versus "not black enough" or between "black" and "black, but not like us."
But there is a third side to Obama -- and also to the politics of racial passing in America.
The population of African immigrants in the United States is rapidly growing. Since 1990, about 50,000 Africans have come to the United States annually, more than in any of the peak years of the international slave trade, which was abolished in 1807. They add to the steady influx of black immigrants from other continents and the Caribbean, and those who have been in the United States for generations but who don't racially and culturally define themselves as African American.
These blacks feel cramped by the narrowness of American racial politics, in which "blackness" has not just defined one's skin color but has served as a code word for African American. To be heard and to be counted, these black immigrants must often pass as African American, sometimes against their will.
Obama is not the first prominent black to defy conventional American racial and cultural categories. People identified former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's Jamaican ancestry as the quality that made his blackness different. When in the mid-1990s it seemed possible that he would run for president, the pride of the Caribbean immigrant community was nearly palpable. He emboldened Caribbean immigrants to resist African American pressures to erase their own cultural and historical distinctiveness.
In such distinctions between black immigrants and African Americans lay buried a history of competitive intra-racial tensions and cultural differences that have never been resolved.
