Profiling Obama

By BILL KELLER, NYT

FOR much of his public life, Barack Obama has been navigating between people who think he is too black and people who think he is not black enough.

The former group speaks mostly in dog-whistle innuendo and focuses on proxy issues to emphasize Obama’s ostensible otherness: his birth certificate, his supposed adherence to “black liberation theology” (presumably before he converted to Islam), his “Kenyan, anticolonial” worldview. Jonathan Alter’s recent book on Obama’s presidency sums up these notions as symptoms of “Obama Derangement Syndrome” — a disorder whose subtext is more often than not: he’s too black.

On the other side are African-Americans and liberals who are disappointed that Obama has not made it his special mission to call out the racism that still festers in American society and rectify the racial imbalance in our economy, in our schools, in our justice system.

“It has, at times, been painful to watch this particular president’s calibrated, cautious and sometimes callous treatment of his most loyal constituency,” the radio and TV host Tavis Smiley told The Times’s Jodi Kantor last year. That was one of the gentler rebukes from the not-black-enough camp.

(More here.)