Stanley Crouch, who appears to be authentically black (but I'm not sure), wrote before the election last year that Obama isn't in fact, black like him.

So when black Americans refer to Obama as "one of us," I do not know what they are talking about. In his new book, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama makes it clear that, while he has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own - nor has he lived the life of a black American.

That wasn't a unique insight.

The black author and essayist Debra J. Dickerson recently declared that “Obama isn’t black” in an American racial context. Some polls suggest that Mr. Obama trails one of his rivals for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the battle for African-American support.

And at the Shepherd Park Barber Shop here, where the hair clippers hummed and the television blared, Calvin Lanier summed up the simmering ambivalence. Mr. Lanier pointed to Mr. Obama’s heritage — he is the American-born son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas — and the fact that he did not embody the experiences of most African-Americans whose ancestors endured slavery, segregation and the bitter struggle for civil rights.

“When you think of a president, you think of an American,” said Mr. Lanier, a 58-year-old barber who is still considering whether to support Mr. Obama. “We’ve been taught that a president should come from right here, born, raised, bred, fed in America. To go outside and bring somebody in from another nationality, now that doesn’t feel right to some people.”

The blackness of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell has also been challenged on the basis that blacks can't be Republican. When confronted by the reality that blacks are in fact Republican, they are relegated to the status of house n_ggers to distinguish them from all the black Secretaries of State in the Democrat party.

The irony here is that Hillary may in fact be blacker than Obama on the basis that being black is no longer a skin color but an American liberal-left subculture. Hillary Clinton inherits the good will the first black president--her husband Bill--developed with whatever voodoo he was using and avoids the disadvantage, in this case, of actually being black.

Strange isn't it? As a white girl from Chicago, Hillary bypasses the whole you're-not-black-enough-your ancestors-weren't-slaves business, while Obama is seen as an outsider.

On the other hand, Hillary being a woman presents her with similar complications among the fairer sex that a male candidate would never have to face.

Identity politics is a mine field.

UPDATE: James Taranto reflects on the byzantine nature of racial identity as well.

But the usage in the Times story makes things even more confusing. Apparently African-American now refers to both the descendants of slaves and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa (though presumably only dark-skinned ones; it is still, as far as we know, politically incorrect to refer to Teresa Heinz Kerry, a white Mozambique native, as "African-American"). Black, at least if Debra Dickerson has her way, refers only to the descendants of slaves.

What, then, do we call members of South Africa's formerly oppressed racial majority? After African-American became the politically correct term for black, we recall hearing stories (perhaps apocryphal) of copy-editors changing references to this group so that they read, for instance, "South Africa's African-American majority." Politically correct language often does more to obscure than to clarify--but maybe that's the idea.