Obama: the Ex-Colored Man?

I read a piece in National Review by Jay Nordlinger about the jazz singer Renee Marie who substituted the national anthem with what is known as "the Negro national hymn" at a ceremony in Denver where the mayor gives a 'State of the City" speech.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. No matter what Renee Marie chose to sing, it was beyond rude to switch the song that she was suppose to sing. It simply wasn't her call. But everyone seemed to make a big deal out of it in a patriotic way. At the time I looked at the words of the song she sang that day, "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," and thought it a beautiful song. I was sort of bewildered at what kind point Renee Marie was trying to make because the song spoke of such a love of this country, so it wasn't some dig at America.

Reading Renee Marie's bio on her website, it seems she does have mixed feelings. In a 2007 interview with a Russian newspaper she said she almost felt compelled to tell them she wasn't American. She said she didn't feel American. She basically says that the injustice that was a part of the black experience for her growing up under the Jim Crow laws made her question the words of all the patriotic songs that she sang in church growing up. I guess she had never been proud of her country until now. That seems familiar to me, but I just can't place it...;-)

In the National Review piece, Nordlinger researches the history the song "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing." It was written 108 years ago by James Weldon Johnson (music was written by his brother) for a Lincoln birthday celebration. Whatever injustices that Renee Marie experienced growing up (and I don't want to minimize them, they were indeed harsh) one can safely say that as a black man who lived between 1871-1938, injustice was even more profound in a society that had barely left slavery behind. Johnson was a part of the Harlem Renaissance. He was a lawyer, politician, song writer, and an educator among other things. But it is obvious to me in his lyrics that he deeply loved this country. I don't think that he would have questioned whether he was American or not.

I have always been fascinated by the Harlem Renaissance in the early 1900's. Blacks asserted their independence with their own enclave of literature, drama, music, visual art, and dance. Years ago I watched a documentary of it with actual film footage of the time. It seemed to me the black community knew they weren't allowed to compete in the white world, so they made their own world. And it really was quite a wonderful world.

Now, I'm going to connect a few seemingly unrelated things here because I just find them interesting. After the brouhaha of the Renee Marie thing, Obama was asked about this Negro anthem and he said, "We have only one national anthem." Obama wouldn't even utter the words, "The Negro National Anthem." Not long after that, as you might recall, Jesse Jackson had some pretty harsh things to say about how Obama "talked down to N***gers"

Well, it just so happens that this same man who wrote the Negro anthem, James Weldon Johnson, also wrote a book called "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man." According to Wikipedia this book "is the fictional telling of the story of a young biracial man, referred to only as the “Ex-Colored Man." "The Ex-Colored Man was forced to choose between embracing his black heritage and culture by expressing himself through the African-American musical genre ragtime, or by "passing" and living obscurely as a mediocre middle-class white man."

Reading through the plot it seems the Ex-Colored man is torn between his two heritiages, white and black. He is raised in a different environment than most other blacks. After seeing a lynching, the Ex-Colored man decides that when it comes to his race he simply wishes to remain neutral. The Ex-Colored Man declares that he “would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race.”

The book is about a black man "passing" as a white man. Which is certaintly not what Obama is doing. But the part about neither disclaiming the black race nor claiming the white race struck me.

Obama never seems to embrace his black heritage to me. And he never mentions or looks at himself as being white in any way other than to reference his mother's family.

And this may be what made Jesse Jackson so angry. Does it anger a "Colored man" to look at an "Ex-Colored man" doing so well? Maybe only if one thinks of themselves like that? Because clearly black men in general don't feel that way.