Back in the 90s when I was young (and dinosaurs roamed the earth), African Americans used to wear shirts that said, "It's a Black Thing (You Wouldn't Understand.)" Some white people were offended by the shirts, and some thought them silly (didn't they become popular in the wake of the first Tim Burton Batman flick, which didn't feature any black stars in spite of taking place in the NYC analog Gotham City?) I can't help but wonder how Barack Obama felt about that sentiment.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Barack Obama most likely did not understand the "Black Thing" celebrated by the t-shirts. Obama never really knew his black dad, was raised by a white mom, white grandparents and an Asian stepfather, and grew up partly in an Asian country and partly on Hawaii, the most racially diverse state in the nation. Obama no doubt fit in on Hawaii (which may explain his choice to stay there for high school rather than travel back to Indonesia with his mother), but Hawaii is anything but a hotbed of African American culture. When Obama came to the mainland United States to go to college, it seems to me he also came to learn about what they used to call "blackness."
My education in "blackness" (do they even use that word anymore?) proceeded roughly during the same period of time as Obama's and led me to many of the same conclusions that Obama holds, even though I'm a white woman. Like Obama, I'm educated, and like him, many of my mentors came through the civil rights movement (and, in some cases, the anti-Vietnam war movement). All of them are currently living, I'm pleased to say. Some are white and some are black, and they harbor varying degrees of anger, resentment, and mistrust of the US government, the so-called white power structure/patriarchy, and the class system in the United States. These mentors, not unlike Obama's most famous mentor Jeremiah Wright, were uniformly bright, but it quickly became apparent to me (as it seems to have become apparent to Obama) that I would need to bring my critical thinking skills to everything these folks had to say.
Obama's remarks about race resonated with me so much that I'm wondering if it's not a black thing, but a generational thing that currently divides America about race. Like all generalizations it's only mostly true at best (like maybe 60% to 75% true), but it seems that people born around 1960 or later are far more likely to see race as Obama sees it, regardless of their particular educational path, and it becomes more and more true with each successive generation