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Obama Defines Blackness

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I am not at all surprised that he nailed it.

“Be confident in your heritage. Be confident in your blackness,” Mr. Obama told a crowd of 15,000 gathered at Washington, D.C.’s Howard University, one of the nation’s leading historically black colleges.

Blackness, he said, had “no litmus test for authenticity,” pointing to his own conflicting critics that have questioned whether he was “too black” or “not black enough.”

“Create your own style, set your own standard of beauty, embrace your own sexuality,” he added. “Because you’re a black person — doing whatever it is that you’re doing — that makes it a black thing!”

I love it, and not just because it encourages the kind of people who define blackness down into a few stereotypes to shut up and go away.

But that is a large part of it.

He urged Howard’s 2,300 graduates to honor their “particular awareness of injustice, unfairness, struggle.” Black skin, Mr. Obama said, “means we cannot sleepwalk through life, we cannot be ignorant of history. We can’t meet the world with a sense of entitlement.”

That too.

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