Stanley Crouch and Debra Dickerson have argued that Barack Obama cannot truly be considered representative of the American black experience, since he is not a descendent of slaves brought here against their will centuries ago. Obama is instead the offspring of a mixed marriage between an African immigrant and an American woman. (On the other hand, there’s no denying that he’s truly ”African-American,” is there?) Dickerson says that just being a black man in America is not enough to qualify as black in the full American sense. That experience has been considered sufficient to qualify for affirmative action, however. Some time ago, Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates lamented that only about a third of black students at Harvard, many of whom are recipients of affirmative action, are “from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendents of slaves.” Perhaps two-thirds are “West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.” The rationale for qualifying them for affirmative action has been that the presumed ordeal of being black in America is the same regardless of origin.

But it is interesting that the first black to be a real contender for the presidency has Obama’s kind of background rather than a traditional American black background. It may not carry a lot of meaning, and doubtless there are many American blacks who could seriously contend for the presidency if they wished to undergo that ordeal, but it raises an issue that has been observed in other contexts. Blacks from Africa and the Caribbean, and their offspring, often do better in the United States than American-born blacks. Why is that?

One reason that comes to mind is that the school systems in these countries, often still influenced by the colonial experience, continue to enforce discipline and teach the basics, and have not gone in for the “progressive” pedagogies and programs of self-expression and self-esteem of the American schools. Another reason is that these countries are less prosperous than the United States and therefore produce a greater seriousness about life. Recently Oprah Winfrey remarked that she has been frustrated visiting inner-city schools in America because she did not see there the real interest in learning that she sees in South Africa, for example, where she is founding a school for girls. Even in the relatively unprosperous inner cities, consumerism is such that Oprah found American kids asking for i-pods and sneakers while South African kids ask for uniforms to go to school. She also remarked that, in America, education is free and available to all, whereas in many countries it is not.

All this suggests that skin color is not the issue. The greater success of foreign-born blacks and their offspring is a matter of goals, effort, attitudes. In that regard, then, another possible reason for the relative failure of American blacks is the Democratic party, and the way it has cultivated dependency and excused blacks from responsibility for their own lives. Blacks coming here from other countries may vote Democrat, but their formation has taken place under other circumstances, whereas American blacks have made the Democratic Party a kind of second church. While Republicans and conservatives have called for personal morality–that is, hard work, individual responsibility, discipline, and commitment in marriage as the best way to rear children and give them a good start in life–Democrats like to emphasize what they call “public morality,” as Hillary Clinton did in a speech in 2005. Public morality means, in effect, making society responsible for the lives of children born out of wedlock, and encouraging blacks to blame society for any shortfalls in their experience. But the covert and often overt endorsement of single motherhood actually perpetuates the self-destructive behavior among blacks that Democrats blame on society.

Meanwhile, stalwart conservatives such as Maggie Gallagher, David Blankenhorn, and Kay Hymowitz tirelessly make the case that the best thing for children (and for adults too, for that matter) is traditional marriage. If Democrats really wanted to improve the lives of American blacks, they would start a marriage initiative, and, coming from them, it might actually have an effect. Here is a way they could serve both public and private morality and help close the gap in performance between different groups of blacks. (According to some researchers, African and Caribbean blacks are more likely to live in traditional families, get an education, and stay out of trouble with the law.) This kind of initiative might also be more useful than emphasizing the experience of American slavery as a mark of difference.