In Ireland there are various levels of being Irish. Only when we decided to have a home in Ireland did we learn that being part of the Diaspora didn't mean you could come blithely back and expect to be considered Irish. In Ireland, despite my extensive Irish ancestry and being gone for only my father's generation, we're a family of "blow ins." Those who aren't are supposedly "locals." There are degrees of this designation as well, each accompanied by rarely stated but fully understood low to high community status.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead's work revealed decades ago that people seek ways to consider themselves better than others - to keep the inner and more prestigious circle intact. Ironically, even those oppressed for years often manufacture prestige boundaries after the yoke has been lifted. Gossip, too, exists in all societies to serve the need humans have for orienting themselves higher in status than otherwise similar others. When wealth, education, fame, and talent are not available to achieve a leg up, and sometimes when they are, it's easy to fall back on old habits of vacuous one-upsmanship.
From psychology comes another explanation for the blackness debate. There is a common tendency to more severely "mark" the actions of people who are different. Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton have more in common than their political party alone. Both of them are minorities in a predominantly white-male Congress and slate of presidential candidates. Marked candidates are ones who are different in readily observable ways (e.g., gender or race). The difference causes us to study them more closely (dress, actions, gestures, expressions) and to use what would be virtually unnoticeable actions by the majority as reasons to categorize minorities. We make the meaningless meaningful for people who are different.
We fall into this trap because most of us are cognitive misers - lazy thinkers using as little of our brains as we can during any given day. We rely on assumptions, inferences, old ways of judging. Instead of helping us rise above such low habits in order to vote for candidates on their merits as people and leaders, the press exploits us. It's easier for them to use facile categories too. No complex thinking needed -- a hallmark of much modern journalism.
Perhaps we should all grow up and wake up. At the very least we should know ourselves as creatures of thought habits susceptible to inadvertent hardening of our categories. This blog won't change the press penchant for using easy explanations -- especially gratuitous ones. It won't stop most of us from slipping into marking minorities. But it may give such "marked" candidates a reason to consider their responses. "That's a category used to divide - to alienate one candidate from another and from the American people," Hillary Clinton might say. "America is about complex combinations of ethnicity - something to be celebrated not a reason for defensiveness," would be useful retort for Barak Obama. They might both use: "Divide Democratic voters based on how black (feminine) I appear or some other facile category and we'll have at least four more years of a man like George Bush. They'll win again."
Personally, give me a president who doesn't lie and a congress that doesn't take bribes in the guise of "fund-raising efforts". Let's find some leaders who aren't feathering their nests, wrecking the environment to make fat cat friends fatter, and who won't send a single person's child to war unless one of theirs goes. We need to get our heads on straight and avoid falling for belittling category stunts. The human brain is an amazing communication system of some million billion synaptic connections. Time to start using them.