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Originally Posted by SomeRandomGuy  Barack Obama has even been accused of not being "black enough", which suggests that the community expects a certain way of acting to be considered "black". |
I believe it was much easier for someone like Barack Obama to come about having had a white anthropologist mother and a Kenyan economist father than it would have been if he had two African American parents. Being largely raised by his white, Unitarian Universalist grandparents in Hawaii likewise probably helped more than if he'd grown up in a more racist area of the US.
While attending college I lived in two different black households. The first was the son of the first two black professors at my university. While he and his parents read authors such as W E B DuBois, they had little to do with most black people, seeing them as too negative. The other household was of a current professor. She attributes much of her success to having been raised in an orphanage rather than by her mother. It seems many African Americans do better when raised outside of popular American black culture, though it can be hard to suggest being raised in a different culture without seeming racist.
A good friend that I grew up with had a football scholarship to a top private university, but instead he intentionally got a girl pregnant. He no longer has anything to do with the mother, but he never went on to college. Being able to have a kid was more important as a sign of manhood than actually raising the kid. The whole stigma against "acting white" seems to mean that if one isn't sabotaging himself in some way, he's just following the slavemasters.
I've dated, befriended, attended church with, and lived with a number of black people. As individuals I don't see them as inherently less capable than someone with a different skin tone, but the mental virus of needing to self-sabotage in order to be seen as black enough can be an issue, and people like Bill Cosby haven't gotten much fanfare for bringing it up. Hopefully over time that will change, as many more options are available today than 50 years ago, much less 150 years ago. People no longer need to limit themselves.