The candidacy of Obama is a good sign for America

A few of the commentators — and, reportedly, many more — go beyond such considerations, however, saying Obama is not one of them and does not therefore win their following because his mother was white, his father was directly from Africa and his ancestors did not experience American slavery or taste the bitterness of the Jim Crow South. It's said he has not endured what many fellow blacks have, and it has been suggested by white and black writers that whites are quicker to embrace him as a presidential candidate than, say, Jesse Jackson, because he does not stir up a deep-down animus the way a black of Jackson's background does.

Now, hear this: While respect for who your ancestors were and what they endured or accomplished is certainly legitimate, determining allegiance to someone on the basis of where that person's ancestors lived or what they did is not just nonsense but the stuff of bigotry.

Go that route, and the next thing you know someone will be saying Rudolph Giuliani should be out of the presidential running because, after all, the parents of his parents were immigrants, and his ancestors were not around to help fight in the Revolutionary War, or that some Southerner should be excluded from consideration because his ancestors fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Among the things we just don't control — and that are no reflection on our worthiness in any connection — are the acts or conditions of our ancestors.

Ancestry was all-important to Jim Crow racists — even a hint of black blood was enough to arouse the most vile forms of discrimination and is still enough to bother racists today. It's true that more whites seem to embrace the candidacy of Obama than ever embraced the candidacy of Jackson, but that has nothing to do with assessments of degrees of blackness and everything to do with assessments of philosophy.

Whether Obama will get to the White House, history will tell, and whether he should is surely open to debate, at the very least, but the fact that he has a chance just as surely says something good about an America where it would once have been unthinkable.

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Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com