Today I was browsing Senator Barack Obama’s campaign website and was admiring the design skills of the team running it. I especially liked the way they discreetly incorporated links to his profile on each of the top social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can see what I’m talking about in the graphic on the left which appears as “Obama Everywhere” on every page of the site.

There was one link on that list that I had never seen before. It goes to Obama’s profile on BlackPlanet.com, a site that is a MySpace-imitator targeted at African Americans. The BlackPlanet site is owned by Community Connect Inc. which describes itself as the “leader in online community destinations for US ethnic groups” while noting that it also offers AsianAvenue.com (for Asian Americans) and MiGente.com (which translates to “My People”, for Latinos).Frankly, the mission of this company is disturbing. The whole premise of social networking sites is to increase opportunities to make connections with people online (which has its own pitfalls, but that’s another discussion). For instance, if you are a Facebook member then you have millions of other people for whom you can link your profile to include them as friends.

Sites like BlackPlanet differentiate themselves by assuming that people of one race will only ever want to be friends with people of the same race. There are a plethora of opportunities on Facebook and MySpace to create and participate in racially/ethnically oriented groups and yet remain able to interact with the larger community. BlackPlanet seems to suffer from the same problem plaguing much of the “Christian” music market namely segregating participants from the larger community based on identity, resulting in an experience that is insulated, stunted, and less reflective of God’s creative hand on all of humanity.

In the case of Barack Obama, the decision to create a profile on BlackPlanet is emblematic of the larger struggle he’s had with the issue of racial identity. Many African Americans have been hesitant to support him because he isn’t “black enough.” His MySpace/Facebook profiles reflect the desire to say, “I’m part of the larger community,” while the BlackPlanet profile figuratively says, “I’m black and I need a place for me and my people.”

It’s sad that our country’s history of brutal slavery and less-than-successful antidotes for it have put Barack Obama in this tangled position. At this historic moment when an African American is poised to take the nomination of a major party, differing aspects of uneasiness with racial identity threaten to take away from this achievement.

This same struggle with identity plays out in Obama’s religious affiliation. On the campaign trail, he openly speaks of his personal faith, including evangelical buzzwords that resonate with the larger Christian community. However, his home church, Trinity United Church of Christ is known for its fervent Afrocentrism, incorporating black identity as a primary component of its confession:

We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian… Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.

African Americans have a legitimate and fascinating Christian religious history that has endured much and contributed much to our society. No one should deny or belittle that history. However, Obama’s connection with Trinity United Church of Christ is troubling since it appears to make black religious history an end in itself, taking the spotlight off of Jesus Christ, his glory, and his faithfulness to people of all nations.

I suspect that Obama’s success as a transformational figure in American life will be determined by his ability to articulate a new and healthy perspective on racial identity. His current approach of maintaining one foot in black separatism and the other in integration is doomed to fail. Until a significant shift is made, he will continue to invite suspicion about either being ashamed of black identity or being uncommitted to refined American values of racial equality and harmony.

Ultimately it comes down to building a new American acceptance of a concept that’s very old: integrity, that a man is the same across all of his different roles because his values are consistent. When it comes to race, Christianity offers us the best spiritual, intellectual, and cultural grounding to say that values and morality are definitional to a person, far more than his skin color or ethnicity.

• Read “The Most Interesting Presidential Candidate,” an article by George Will
• Read A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win by Shelby Steele
• Read The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America by Shelby Steele