By THOMAS F. SCHALLER|July 03, 2008
Democratic Sen. Barack Obama is the first nonwhite candidate in U.S. history to win a major-party presidential nomination. That fact alone makes him a tradition-breaking, political pioneer.
Much less discussed is that Mr. Obama is an atypical, nontraditional African-American politician, too.
I'm not talking about Mr. Obama's rhetorical abilities or personal charisma, which set him apart from the vast majority of American politicians of all races. I refer instead to five aspects of Mr. Obama's biography that make him unique even among America's black political class.
For starters, Mr. Obama has one white parent and, consequently, has a light complexion. This may seem irrelevant to some, but having a white Kansan for a mother allows Mr. Obama to connect his identity to a wider group of Americans. During the early stages of the Democratic primary, Mr. Obama's stump speech included a standard joke about how it was a bit of a "bummer" that a search of his genealogical past revealed that he is a distant cousin of Republican Vice President Dick Cheney.
Second, Mr. Obama's black half is continental African. This means his ancestry on his Kenyan father's side of the family is of more recent immigrant stock, and that his family's American experience contrasts starkly with that of African-Americans who descended from slave populations brought involuntarily to America hundreds of years ago.
Taken together, these first two characteristics are a fitting departure for a man who may become the president of a nation where the share of mixed-race citizens is growing, and more than one in 15 new marriages is interracial.
Occupational background is another difference between Mr. Obama and many of the prominent African-American candidates who preceded him.
Before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, segregation and discrimination made it difficult for most African-Americans to attain status in the fields of business or law, the two most common pre-political occupations of elected officials. Instead, the black church often served as the key proving ground for aspiring black politicians. As my University of Maryland, Baltimore County colleague Tyson King-Meadows and I documented in our 2006 book about black state legislators, the share of black legislators with clerical backgrounds remains higher than it does for white legislators.
