On minorities and winning

I've been wanting to write something about the rise of Barack Obama for a while, even though I'm not an American and even though my understanding of the American presidential race is filtered through Australian media reports. What I want to write about isn't so much the intricacies of the campaign, so much as how he as a minority got there, and what that means.

I saw a documentary done by an Australian TV show called Four Corners which gauged the response of African Americans to Obama. They seemed to fall into two camps: the people who were really on board with his identity and his campaign, and the people who felt that he wasn't suitable, either because he wasn't 'black enough' because of his half-white, half-Kenyan background, or because they thought he was compromising himself too much just by running.

( random thoughts behind the cut )