Black Enough/White Enough: The Obama Dilemma [Paperback]

Barack is caught between two worlds and struggles for acceptance by either sideBlack enough? White enough? Its a fine line that he must walk, writes Illinois state Senator Rickey Hendon, inBlack Enough/White Enough: The Obama Dilemma, a personal memoir of the historic 2008 presidential election. Hendon, an African American senator from Chicagos blighted West Side, was a veteran politico firmly aligned with other Black leaders when the man who would go on to become the golden presidential hopeful was an upstart balancing atop Americas cultural fence in one the most notoriously segregated cities in the nation. This newcomer was of a different stock than Chicagos old guard, which boasted icons such as Rev. Jesse Jackson, late Mayor Harold Washington and Minister Louis Farrakhan, and was initially eyed with some suspicioneven by Hendon himself as the two served side by side in the Illinois state Senate. And as Hendon explains in this book, the phenomenon that became Barack Obama, the audacious presidential hopeful, was created not just by wooing Americas whites, but also by winning acceptance by Americas Blacks.