Black community increasingly protective of Obama

They all landed in the black community’s doghouse after being viewed as endangering Barack Obama’s chances of being elected president. And the community’s desire to protect the first African American ever to be in this position may only grow with his win in North Carolina and his close loss in Indiana.

“I have parents who are still living who are very enthusiastic about Obama,” said Valerie Grim, the chair of Indiana University’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. “They live in Mississippi. For a time, my parents couldn’t vote, and when they could, their only choice was a white person.

“This means more than just saying there’s a black person on the ticket. It represents the things they had been denied.

Given such sentiment, it has not taken much for other public figures to move from icon to pariah. When Bill Clinton called Obama’s position on Iraq a “fairy tale” in New Hampshire, “I think black people felt betrayed,” said Andrea Plaid, a blogger who writes under the pen name the Cruel Secretary. African Americans continued to regard Clinton highly even after he was impeached for lying under oath. “And you turn around and do this to us?” Plaid said.

Smiley, the renowned black author and commentator, took issue with Obama for skipping his “Covenant With Black America” event in New Orleans so he could campaign in Texas and Ohio. The resulting backlash left Smiley feeling “hammered” and “barbequed” by black Americans.

Wright has been hailed by many in the black clergy as a brilliant liberation theologian. But after his speech and question-and-answer session at the National Press Club last month, people commented on the blog Jack and Jill Politics — billed as a political sounding board for the “black bourgeois — that the minister should have known better than to pick a fight...