Erin Aubry Kaplan: For Blacks, a Rift over Obama

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing editor to the Times Opinion pages. Her collected essays will be published in October.

It was the kind of insular, issue-driven, black-on-black debate that ordinarily doesn't attract the media spotlight, even on the slowest news day. But thanks to the unprecedented profile of Barack Obama, the most famous black person in modern history, this one got hot.

Last month, in an interview with Chris Hedges on Truthdig.com, Princeton professor Cornel West gave a scathing assessment of Obama's presidential performance so far. West let it rip with a kind of racially tinged dissatisfaction with Obama that's been brewing for months. Specifically, he called the black president out for what he sees as his complicity with the agenda of white, moneyed elites. He called Obama a "black mascot" for Wall Street, and at one point accused him of not acting like a "free black man."...

But the real divide is not between West and Obama or West and Harris-Perry, it's between two age-old, unresolved strategies black leaders have adopted throughout history to ensure black survival in America: nationalism and assimilation. Assimilation holds that blacks must claim their place in the mainstream to be successful; nationalism maintains that black success starts — and perhaps ends — with building and sustaining group unity. Fueling the latest image anxiety is a taboo question that animated the comments of an increasingly irate West: What good is Obama to us? By 'us' I mean black masses who are a crucial and historical part of the American working class and poor for whom West has always advocated....