Opinion: Barack Obama’s race, Hillary Clinton’s gender and the 2008 race

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Let’s sit back and get a little less comfortable on a Sunday morning.

Nothing can cause a collective national squirm quite like a little racial tension. All those sentiments that are usually the stuff of private conversation, if spoken at all, are playing out in the harsh light of the campaign for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. That black thing-white thing, thing. We are dealing with race -- again -- whether we want to or not.

It is hard to believe that a mere three months ago, the good and overwhelmingly white people of Iowa started the whole process of the presidential race, delivering a powerful verdict on the Democratic side that Barack Obama’s race was no impediment to his pursuit of the White House.

How quaint.

Now we are in the ultimate where-you-stand-depends-on-where-you-sit moment. It’s never easy being a first, and perhaps the only surprising thing about the role race is now playing in the Democratic primary is that it took this long to boil. Meanwhile, beneath the same surface, the gender issue simmers.

From the outset, Obama faced questions that no other candidate had to face, ranging from ‘is he black enough?’ to ‘is he maybe ‘too black’?’

Or, as a white colleague pointed out, maybe the real question among whites was whether he was white enough. Who wants to start that conversation?

Then came questions about his faith. Was Barack Hussein Obama really a closet....

Muslim? Talk radio types just love the sound of his middle name, Hussein. After all, he quit wearing that flag pin and seemed to be caught not putting his hand over his heart during a patriotic song. It was the full-employment act for spammers and bloggers.

A campaigning ex-president, Bill Clinton, threw logs on the fire in South Carolina with his racially-tinged comments. But the bonfire came from the disclosure of some sermons of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, with his bombastic manner and inflammatory words, at least to the white ear.

What do white people know about sermons and ways of the black church? Did folks listen to the whole sermon or just the 10 most controversial seconds? Or is Wright more a purveyor of hate than love?

No doubt some young staffers in the opposition research department of the Republican National Committee are watching every Wright sermon ever delivered to put together an attack ad. Not to mention how they might shape Michelle Obama’s comment, ‘For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.’ Context already is a casualty. The Swift Boat ads will look like Hallmark cards.

Obama received some implicit support last week, as reported here, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the highest-ranking African-American in the Bush administration, said discrimination against blacks was like a national ‘birth defect’ that has yet to heal.

Obama didn’t help himself when he called out his grandmother as a ‘typical white person.’ Yet for all you ‘typical white persons’ out there, wasn’t there some truth in Obama’s story about crossing the street to avoid contact with black men?

In fact, is it not at least part of Obama’s appeal that he is precisely the kind of black man you would not cross the street to avoid? We started to have this conversation with all the 1996 talk about Colin Powell, a previous high-ranking black in the Bush administration, running for president and someone came up with the thought-provoking notion that he was every white person’s ideal of what a black man should be.

Does Obama himself play to race? How do we listen? Obama has infused some of his speeches, particularly to predominantly black audiences, with language that, to the attuned ear, recalls the rhetoric of Malcolm X. Is that black enough for you? To some, he can’t win even if he does win. Shelby Steele seems to believe that even if Obama were elected president, he somehow would disappoint people and, as such, maybe he just shouldn’t prevail so as to avoid that prospect.

Race in the race has another dimension too, hardly limited to black and white. Neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton speaks much more than a phrase of Spanish, yet both court the Latino vote.

And that very vote has underscored a clear tension between blacks and Latinos, with the irony being that the white candidate, Clinton, is the beneficiary. And, while we are at it, given that 90 percent of black voters are casting ballots for Obama, are they doing it based on his race?

If racism is the country’s original sin, discrimination against women isn’t all that far behind.

Americans don’t often like to talk about race, or if they do, it is in ways that are either too hot or too cold. For that matter, they don’t like to talk about gender equity, either, and that seems to be a recurring theme for Clinton.

On the other hand, Obama’s never had a writer from The Washington Post examine whether he was showing cleavage. That said, Clinton can directly invoke gender in ways that Obama cannot directly invoke race.

It is OK for her to talk about how every mother and daughter should look to her with pride and how rich it would be for the United States to have a woman as president. Obama can’t exactly say, now can he, how great it would be to have the first African American president?

-- Mike Tackett

Mike Tackett writes for the Swamp of the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau.