Barack Obama is black. He is not biracial, much less white.
Some say that in American society you are whatever you say you are. Like Tiger Woods calling himself Cablinasian. If only. But even from that point of view, Obama is still black: he has always called himself either “black” or “African American”, never biracial, never mixed.
Yes, he was brought up by the white side of his family, mostly by his grandparents who grew up in Kansas. Yes, he barely knew his black father from Kenya or any other black people while growing up. That is why Steve Sailer says he is a white man trying to act black – a wigger.
But what makes you black in America is not your upbringing but how you look.
So even during that supposedly wholesome white Kansan upbringing that he had, he had white coaches who passed him over for less able white players. He had few if any girlfriends because only black girls would date him and there were few of them at his private school in Hawaii.
When whites do not accept you because of how you look but blacks do, then you are black. Not just black but “black enough” in all the ways that truly matter.
So Obama is not just black but he is also black enough.
When neither whites nor blacks accept you – you are too black for the whites and too white for the blacks – then you become biracial. That was not Obama’s experience, so he is not biracial – except in the strict sense of the word, a sense that is useless when talking about black Americans since most are part white. Some are even mostly white by blood.
Some seem to think that having a white parent and a black parent is something new, something the 1960s brought in. Hardly. The mixing of the races may have been looked down on (and still is in many quarters), but it has been going on in America a long, long time, almost from the very beginning of the country. There are plenty of light-skinned blacks to prove it. And DNA tests on white Americans show that a tenth of them are mixed with black too.
But then why this urge to see Obama as biracial?
Is it because we are entering a new and better day when the colour line is going away, when the One Drop Rule is becoming something only found in history books? I wish.
Partly it is because biracial people, understandably, want to claim him as one of their own, but mainly it is because many white people do not want to admit we will now have a black president. It is easier for them to see him as biracial or mixed or half-white.
Anything but black.
Calling Obama biracial would not be progress: it would allow whites to hold on to their racist views about blacks. Thank God Michelle Obama will be the first lady.
See also:
Read Full Post »
Abagond 