In his uniquely open discussion of race and how it determined the trajectory of his life, Barack Obama made the issues (ironically enough) seem easy to parse.
For one thing, there is the simple matter that much of his thinking about being American has to do with his father's immigrant experience and a deep-down-inside belief that this place of dreams and contradictions is a "magical place."
Add to the mix the loving relationship Obama had with his white mother and you have the following: someone who seems naturally gifted to be the long-awaited political bridge between the American races.
Obama's success so far seem to confirm what many readers and scholars of race journals have been saying for almost a generation now.
That black immigrants often show a dis-connection (as a Freudian psychologist maybe would use the term) from the weighted experiences of African Americans who, since the end of slavery in the mid Nineteenth Century, have confronted hostile environments controlled by white majorities.
Much as for Obama's Kenya-born father, this dis-connection has been see in varying degrees in hundreds of thousands of people of African descent who've come to the U.S. in the past century from the Caribbean, largely to New York City, and most notably to Brooklyn.
Because they come from majority black island/nations and their experiences with slavery were more remote in time than is the case in the United States, the feelings about race are often different than witnessed in the U.S., less pulled by specifically race-based inner conflict.
Any claim of less race conflict among Caribbeans can easily be overstated. It should not be forgotten that one of the most notable black nationalists of the Twentieth Century, Marcus Garvey, was from the Caribbean.
But this assessment does go a long way in explaining, for example, the ease with which some Caribbean Americans in Brooklyn flow into political lanes that their native-born sisters and brethren resist.
Una Clarke [photo] comes to mind. She was, some 20 years ago, the first West Indian born person elected to the New York City Council. She is also the mother of Congressmember Yvette Clarke.
Ever the iconoclast, Una Clarke often argued that she was different from native-born black Americans and her Congressional campaign eight years ago was notable for its divisiveness pitting immigrants against native-born blacks.
True to this pattern, Una Clarke, who spent her Council years as a Democrat, went on to work with Republican Gov. George Pataki after she retired from the Council.
And lately she has defended her daughter's decision, still in effect so far, to stick with Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama, despite the fact that Yvette's congressional district went for Obama in the Feb. 5 primary.
This case of the Clarkes is only one case, granted, but perhaps it goes a way in explaining what might be a lack of furor in Brooklyn, and in Clarke's congressional district specifically, about Yvette Clarke's continued support of Clinton.
More on this will come, for certain.
Thanks, Barack for bringing it up.
[Photo of Una Clarke is by The Observer's Azi Paybarah.]
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