Across the Divide

Cornel West was on fire. Bobbing in his chair, his hands sweeping across the stage, the brilliant and bombastic scholar was lambasting Barack Obama's campaign. Before a black audience, at an event outside Atlanta called the State of the Black Union, West was questioning why Obama was 600 miles away, announcing his bid for the White House in Springfield, Ill. Did he really care about black voters? What did that say about his willingness to stand up for what he believes?

"He's got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties and concerns, and he's got to speak to them in such a way that he holds us at arm's length," West said, pushing his hand out for emphasis. "So he's walking this tightrope." West challenged the candidate to answer a stark set of questions: "I want to know how deep is your love for the people, what kind of courage have you manifested in the stances that you have and what are you willing to sacrifice for. That's the fundamental question. I don't care what color you are. You see, you can't take black people for granted just 'cause you're black."

A few days later, West was sitting in his Princeton office after class when the phone rang. It was Barack Obama. "I want to clarify some things," the candidate calmly told the professor of religion and African-American studies. Over the next two hours, Obama explained his Illinois state Senate record on criminal justice and affordable health care. West asked Obama how he understood the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and interrogated him about a single phrase in Obama's 2004 Democratic-convention speech: that America was "a magical place" for his Kenyan father. "That's a Christopher Columbus experience," West said. "It's hard for someone who came out of slavery and Jim Crow to call it a magical place. You have to be true to yourself, but I have to be true to myself as well." A few weeks later, the two men met in a downtown Washington, D.C., hotel to chat about Obama's campaign staff. Just a month after ripping into him onstage, West endorsed Obama and signed up as an unpaid adviser.

West may have come around, but he raised one of the most potent—and controversial—questions facing the candidate: is he black enough? It's one that has long dogged Barack Obama's career, though he says he settled his own struggle with racial identity (as the son of an African father and white, Kansan mother) in his late teens. Questions about black "authenticity" are hardly unique to him; many successful African-Americans face them, too. Obama just happens to be grappling with the issue in full public view as he runs for the highest office in the land.

To the candidate, the debate says more about America's state of mind than it does about him. "I think America is still caught in a little bit of a time warp: the narrative of black politics is still shaped by the '60s and black power," he tells NEWSWEEK. "That is not, I think, how most black voters are thinking. I don't think that's how most white voters are thinking. I think that people are thinking about how to find a job, how to fill up the gas tank, how to send their kids to college. I find that when I talk about those issues, both blacks and whites respond well."

He may be right. One eye-catching measure of Obama's broad support is his extraordinary fund-raising. More than 150,000 donors gave $31 million for his primary campaign in the second quarter, roughly $10 million ahead of Hillary Clinton and far ahead of anyone else in either party. In the key, early-primary state of South Carolina, Obama and Clinton are locked in a close fight for Democratic voters, especially African-Americans who are the backbone of the state party; recent polls have shown the lead changing hands each month. Nationwide, the latest NEWSWEEK Poll suggests that race is no longer the barrier it once was to electing a president. A clear majority—59 percent—says the country is ready to elect an African-American president. That's up from 37 percent at the start of the decade, but it still indicates that a significant percentage of the country is either skeptical or prejudiced.