Parker: Following up on ‘the first female president’ comment

By Kathleen Parker

In the days since I suggested President Barack Obama's rhetorical style mimics feminine tropes, I've been informed of the following:

One, a black man cannot show anger in public lest he be considered an Angry Black Man.

Two, to suggest that a black man has any feminine characteristics, even when framed as an “evolutionary achievement,” is to emasculate and reduce him to a figure from Jim Crow days. These were the two most common complaints I heard in the column's wake. Some who wrote were polite, self-identifying African-Americans who sort of agreed with my point but wanted to help me see things a different way. Others were not so civil.

Do I think people are too sensitive? Yes. Do I think I may have overstepped the line? No. My thesis, bouncing off the notion that Bill Clinton was the first black president, is serious only insofar as you really think Clinton is black.

But I also recognize that my life experience is different from that of most African-Americans. And that experience allows me both the luxury of seeing people without the lens of race, but also (sometimes) to fail to imagine how people of other backgrounds might interpret my words.

As my Post colleague Jonathan Capehart wrote on the PostPartisan blog - and explained to me in a telephone conversation - black men are held to a different standard than whites. They are practiced in keeping their emotions under wraps. They can't “go off,” as some have urged Obama to do in response to the Gulf oil spill.

You'll have to take me at my word when I say that I don't view Obama exclusively as a black man - no matter what he said on his census form. Not only is he half-white, but also he has managed to transcend skin color, at least from where I sit.

As a sidebar, there's another reason I don't see him as only black. He is my cousin. I learned of this surprising family link when a cousin conducting genealogical research contacted me recently.

Apparently, we are descended of brothers whose parents - Johann Pieter Straub and Anna Maria Barbara Hoffman - emigrated from Germany to the colonies about 1733. According to the family grid, Obama and I seem to be eighth cousins once removed.

I am proud to be Obama's cousin. But that bond doesn't blind me to his - and our - flaws. In my earlier column, I sought only to offer one possible reason the president is paying such a high price for his response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. American culture is complicated, and gender expectations play an important part. Like it or not, that includes not only our more progressive contemporary thinking about such matters but also our less progressive history. Together, this mix of ideas forms a minefield that leaders must traverse.

Consider: In the days leading up to the president's Oval Office address about the gulf crisis, there was a lot of talk about the “style” of Obama's response. On MSNBC, Donny Deutsch argued that he “just doesn't emote.”

Obama elected to employ a certain type of rhetoric in the Oval Office that put him in line with feminine rhetorical traditions and at odds with historical precedent and the expectations for his gender. Such a choice ultimately may prove to be a crucial step forward toward a better world. But the backlash against his rhetoric suggests we're not there yet.

Speaking as a cousin, and a not-so-sensitive columnist-citizen, I'm pulling for him to do better.

n Comments: kathleenparker@

washpost.com