Straight Acting

Early in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, one occasionally heard black critics of Barack Obama question his racial credentials. Was he really black? Was he black enough? These critics noted that Obama’s mother was white, that his father was born in Africa and thus had not lived through segregation and the American civil rights struggle, that he was light-skinned, that he talked like a white person, and enjoyed the sort of educational privileges more commonly enjoyed by whites than by blacks.