http://starbulletin.com/2007/02/08/news/story02.html

In one way, it illustrates the difference between physical deafness and cultural Deafness. Someone landing off a plane from Nairobi and gaining citizenship in America is not culturally African-American, even though they are 100% genetically African and an American. (Meanwhile , the average Black American has about 20% European genes, thus less African than the recent immigrant!)

Because they have not shared the unique cultural experience of The Middle Passage, Slavery, Emancipation, Jim Crow, Segregation, the Civil Rights Struggle and working through the history of various cultural phenomena of Black American Culture. But that does not make Obama “more white” or “less Black.”

I think the Deaf Community gives Obama the perfect analogy. He’s like a LATE-DEAFENED individual, or someone raised strictly Oralist, who late in life comes to embrace Deaf Culture.

He was raised in White Culture. (His father abandoned him at age 6, leaving him to be raised by his White mother and White maternal grandparents.) He got to take advantage of all the opportunites of White Culture that other Black Americans couldn’t. (Like a Deaf of Hearing who could speak and lip-read well.)

Yet, he understood the oppression of his fellow African-Americans, married an African-American, moved into a Black neighborhood and championed the community’s causes in the Illinois Senate and now in the US Senate.

To me, he not only demonstrates the difference between genetic and cultural being African American, but he also illustrates a kind of “Blackhood,” where people should discard the path of how you GOT THERE, and embrace the fact that YOU ARE THERE, which is the central message of Deafhood.

very good point. will need to soak that thinking in before commenting my two cents.

you should blog more often