by Quincy McDevitt

Created on: May 04, 2008   Last Updated: May 08, 2008

Barack Obama is not African-American in the traditional sense. He is half African and half white. His father was not a descendant of slaves. Obama did not see the ghettos of Chicago until he was in his twenties and an Ivy Leaguer. He graduated from Columbia in 1983, with a degree in political science. That must have been when he decided to be a politician. Why else would he leave a job as a financial consultant in New York City? He took a job working as a community organizer in a place he had never lived; a black community. Jeremiah Wright and the United Church of Christ was Obama's bridge to that community.

"I could no more disown Rev. Wright, than I could the black community," Obama said, a week or so before Wright's appearance in front of the National Press Club. During that speech, Wright said several things that led to Obama's reaction. Wright blamed the U.S. government for creating the AIDS virus and called Louis Farrakhan one of the great voices of the 20th and 21st centuries. Obama did the only thing he could; he disowned Wright, publicly and vehemently.

With Wright gone, has Obama unintentionally disowned a portion of Black America? It was only in January, after Obama's surprise win in Iowa, that the media stopped asking the question, "Is Obama black enough?"

Listening to Barack talk about Black Liberation Theology and his church, after disowning Wright, he sounded his worst as he picked words at three to five second intervals. It was like surgery for cancer; he was cutting away the deadly and trying to salvage the healthy.

Obama was not brought up like most African American children. He was born in Hawaii where he attended private school before his family moved to Indonesia, where he attended more private schools. After his mother divorced his father, Barack Obama Sr., she married an oil man, Lolo Soetoro.

Obama's claim is that he can unite all of America to right the wrongs. He says he can do that because of his experience with different cultures and his understanding of his personal identity. Being bi-racial, Obama learned to fit in, no matter where he was.

Obama used Wright to gain acceptance in Chicago, because he knew he would need the Black Church vote to rise in politics.

Barack did not come from a religious family. In Obama's book, "Dreams from my Father", he describes his mother's view of religion.

"For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness," Obama wrote.

But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways - and not necessarily the best way - that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives."

Coming from this background, Obama didn't have a religious leg to stand on in the 1980s when he decided to plant his political seed in the south side of Chicago. That is when he joined the United Church of Christ, out of necessity.

After cutting loose Jeremiah Wright, is Obama still black enough? Wright is not likely to go away and he has a bigger stage than ever for his rhetoric. Obama's asset from the beginning of his political career very well may be the end of his presidential hopes.

Learn more about this author, Quincy McDevitt.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.