It's clear to even the casual observer that Obama's blackness is being challenged because he was impoverished. The bottom lines is that Obama is still treated as a Black person. The one drop rule still applies. It's like Muhammad Ali said, a Black man with a million dollars is still a Ni**r with a million dollar.
The rush of upward mobility produced the inevitable identity crisis, which led in turn to endless discussions about the meaning of blackness in a world where skin color was beginning to matter less.
Black Americans who came from successful, upwardly mobile families were regularly dismissed as white or inauthentic. The authentic black experience, it was said, was limited to the hard-core, impoverished upbringing that black people often chose to brag about, even when they had actually grown up in the lap of luxury.
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