Of Obama´s ancestry and Du Bois´s "The Souls of Black Folks"

In Chicago I wanted to see Grant´s Park.
I wanted to be at the place Obama´s victory speech took place.
So I went there.

In Cincinnati I wanted to be closer to the abolitionist´s history. Cincinnati has an awesome history when it comes to the abolitionists, being by de river Ohio and just having on the other side at a walking distance Newport and pro-slavery Kentucky.
So I went to the Freedom Center and to the American I Am exhibit at de Cincinnati Museum.

In the American I Am: The African American Imprint the corner stone of the exhibit was Du Bois´s question " Would America have been America without her Negro people?".

There I came across with some African American writers I have never heard of: Douglass, Dunbar and of course Du Bois. Moments of courage were told. Moments of creativity. Never ending conviction.
Barack Obama was presented here as the cherry on the top of the cake.

My next stop was a near by Barnes and Nobles and I left the bookshop with half a dozen books feeling that I should get half a dozen more.

Reading the first essay of The souls of black folks by W. E. B. Du Bois all of a sudden came to my mind Barack Obama´s election and it´s critics that said that Obama wasn´t black enough and also that he wasn´t an African American. That statement puzzled me at the time. Obama was to me without a shadow of a doubt black but, he was not for a vast number of man and women in the USA by 2008.
In a color-line based society such is the American society that was beyond reason to me at the time.
It was only now after reading Of our spiritual strivings of Du Bois that I finally got it. It´s now clearer to me why Obama is not black for the African American standards.

Obama is not the produce of slavery in America.
He hasn´t got "that dual soul - American and Negro - carved in unreconceiled strivings" as Du Bois put it more than a 100 years ago.
He´s ancestors and himself didn´t endure the history of American Negro, the history of strife it self.
He´s hasn´t got "The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, (...)", and I quote Du Bois once more.

Obama is something else.
Obama is not the first African American elected president of the United States of America.

Barack Obama is the son of a white American woman with a foreigner as a father... that happens to be a black man from an African country.