Sometime before Barack Obama became the flavor of the month in last year's primary election, a white friend opined that Obama would have a difficult time appealing to enough white people to get the nomination (a calculus that had some currency but was nonetheless disproved in time). Another friend, an African American, responded that he might have even more trouble garnering black votes because, "Obama may be an African American, but he's really not black." When pressed for elaboration, he responded with pretty much the same argument found here in this comment on a Salon editorial: Obama's blackness is informed not so much by a shared history of other blacks, but observations of their experiences.... he is not the descendant of former slaves. He did not grow up listening to the stories of at least one side of his family passing down the history of the enslavement, lynching, and oppression of his forefathers and mothers. He is unique, in that his father was from Africa who did well, married a white woman and raised in general affluence. He has no relatives that were lynched or died at the hands of police choke holds. No cousins or brothers are sitting in prison for drug or violence related offenses.

Tichy's premise seems to ring true as we observe how Obama tends to skitter away from the issue of race and takes a less confrontational, less authentically black tack. Yet, as both Carter, Walsh and Tichy conclude, race is something with which Obama will have to grapple if he is ever going to make any progress on the social issues which comprise his political agenda. The question is: is our first multicultural president (as Tichy describes Obama) the right man to handle the dog whistles and the appeals to our history's coarser nature? Is his approach of making white America feel less uncomfortable about race and its unsavory role in American life an honest, courageous means of confronting an issue that won't just go away regardless of how many generations wander in the desert? Or is he just "kicking it down the road" for the first really Black president to finally address? Paraphrasing A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. to Clarence Thomas, is Obama black enough to be not just post-racial, but really anti-racist?