Black and White Obama

He’s Not Black” by Marie Arana

“He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that — he calls himself that — because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There’s no in-between.

[...]We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president.

[...]

Few who see Barack Obama, it seems, understand that he’s 50 percent white Kansan. Even fewer understand what it means to be second-generation Kenyan. It reminds me of something sociologist Troy Duster and bioethicist Pilar Ossorio once observed: Skin color is seldom what it seems. People who look white can have a significant majority of African ancestors. People who look black can have a majority of ancestors who are European.

In other words, the color of a president-elect’s skin doesn’t tell you much. It’s an unreliable marker, a deceptive form of packaging. Isn’t it time we stopped using labels that validate the separation of races? Isn’t it time for the language to move on?

Filed under: Excerpts & Quotes, Politik , Black or Not, Obama, President, Truth, USA