Was reading this article on CNN and thought I’d bring the debate here to the board to see what 'dopers think.
I can identify. I’m also a mixed race individual, though I commonly identify with the racial group ‘Hispanic’, the tag is pretty much meaningless for anything but the broadest terms. I know people who self identify as Hispanics who are blond haired and blue eyed…in fact, there are several of my cousins who have brown hair and green eyes (definitely a European in the wood pile :)).
I think the key is self-identification. If your mother is one ‘race’ and your father is another ‘race’ it’s really which group you identify with more…or perhaps which parents culture or ‘race’ you more associated with when you were a kid.
I think most people in America today are “mixed race”. I’m only 7/8 Cherokee, and hundred-percenters are more and more rare. With blacks, though, I think self-identification works only to a limited extent. Sometimes, people look at an Indian and will usually guess Italian, Middle Eastern, or Hispanic as often as anything else. But blacks wear their race on their sleeve, as it were — often even if they’re half-and-half. It’s not something Obama can hide. For whatever reason, he has clearly self-identified as black, based on his marriage and his social life (or at least, what we know of it). But even if he didn’t, I think that most people (and not just bigots) would tend to place him there. I think that, as a problem issue, it was much worse a long time ago, because I remember being on the shit-end of bigotry as a child. But I think things are much better these days, certainly for me and probably for Obama. Frankly, I think his name hurts him among racist-type people more than his skin color.
It’s about how other people view you more than self-identification. Race only becomes an issue when it helps or hurts you. Even if your cousins view themselves as Hispanic, if people treat them as a White people, then they are basically living that life. Most people looking at Obama, Tiger Woods, or Halle Berry, see Black people. Doesn’t matter what their actual background is because the reality is most people are “mixed” from a genetic point of view.
I think it’s very weird he’s seen as black when he’s 50/50 and his upbringing was almost exclusively by white people (as if white is something you have to achieve but black is a default). I’ve wondered if Europeans or others see him as black or as biracial. I suppose technically he’s mulatto since that’s still a legal designation in some law codes.
It’s interesting that the first “black” presidential nominee has neither slavery nor Jim Crow in the experiences of his ancestors. (His wife does; Michelle traces her ancestry to both slaves and slaveowners.)
Aside: I’m reading a book on the extended Hemings family (not just Sally but her siblings and their issue) and an interesting thing was the law in Virginia and some other states at that time counted anybody who was more than 3/4 white as white. It was legally permissible for a white person to marry a person who had a known African great-grandmother (though I’m sure there would have been prejudice) and this happened (one of Sally’s nieces was purchased by her white owner who manumitted and legally married her as, like Sally’s children, she was 7/8 white). The interesting thing though is that the status of your birth (free or slave) DID NOT CHANGE unless you were manumitted. I’m not sure how often it happened, but it did happen (often at Monticello) that a person could be both legally white and legally a slave.
My wife has been saying the same thing for a while. And I disagree. Obama does talk about his White mother and his White relatives. They are not diminished in his life story. And as pointed out there are few in this country who are not “mixed” to some degree. But still, race is a sociological grouping and no matter that he was raised by a White family and had a White mother, others would always look at him and categorize him as “Black.” (Very few would look at him and call him “White” and truth is he is no more mixed than most other “Black” Americans.) He could have chosen to dispute that (and have had only some success) as his sole identity or he could have chosen to embrace it. Either were understandable choices.
I don’t know how to say this delicately, Samp, but he looks black. His complexion is dark. His hair is kinky. His eyes are dark brown, almost black. He just has certain features that many people are used to identifying with African-Americans. It’s the same reason that Tiger Woods is perceived as black. Most people probably haven’t even seen a picture of Obama’s mother or grandparents. They just go by what’s in front of their eyes.
Interesting…I never thought of it in these terms before. I guess I was wrong about the self identification thing after all (not like it’s the first time I’ve been wrong). As Liberal said, though I’m Hispanic (of native Indian and mixed European, probably Spanish), I could probably be mistaken for any of the southern European Mediterranean nationalities, including Arab (in fact I’ve been asked before if I’m of Arabic decent). However, I suppose in our collective minds black is black.
I wonder though…wouldn’t this go for Asian as well? I know a lot of mixed race Asians who have one ‘white’ parent and one Asian parent and I think most people associate them as Asians regardless of how they self identify. And now thinking while I’m typing…I guess ‘white’ is another of those same outside identification things. If you LOOK ‘white’ then you are ‘white’…same as ‘black’.
We’ve been over this a number of times. In the US, if you look Black or mixed you end up being labeled as Black most of the time. It’s really not more complicated than that. Some of this traces to the “one drop rule” that was encoded into law not that long ago, but I think that as long as the country is majority White, you are going to be classified as “other” if you don’t look White. I’m sure Obama looks different to his Kenyan relatives, and they probably see him as mixed, but then they’re used to seeing mostly Black Africans in their daily lives.
And of course he self-identifies as Black, so that’s the most important thing.
I’d say either one is correct for Obama, and probably for most other people with similar backgrounds, because he’s had the experience of being black and the experience of being biracial. (I’m sure the same is true for most people with backgrounds like his.) That’s a pretty central dilemma in Dreams from My Father: he doesn’t look white and so he isn’t treated as white by anyone, but he also has a different background from most American blacks, partly because his mother and the grandparents who helped raise him were white, and partly because of his time in Hawaii and Indonesia. So he doesn’t fit in neatly with either group; he wasn’t necessarily accepted by black students who knew his background when he was younger either. I guess that’s also at the root of the spectacularly unenlightening “Is he black enough?/Is he too black?” debates the talking head types were having back when they were sure he couldn’t win.
Very interesting question and timely. I have often wondered this myself. I am half Spanish (fathers side) and half Mexican (mothers side)–but I can pretty much guarantee that if you met me 99% of the people on this board would identify me as white. Throughout my life I have had other Hispanic coworkers not believe I was Hispanic–even though my surname is a very Hispanic name!
However I grew up very Hispanic, very traditional poor working man background. My father was a railroad laborer, my mother didn’t work, etc. Today I probably make more in a month then my father made in a year–I am very successful in my chosen field. I grew up with dual words for most household items, knowing them both by their spanish name and the english name. Can even make a pretty damn good tortilla (well not exactly round mind you, but a good approximation!).
But I am perceived as white by most people. I have always wondered if I was darker or had more traditional Hispanic features if I would be a successful as I have been. So am I ‘white’ or ‘hispanic’? My daughter is even more of a melting pot as her mother is Irish, Italian, German and English–mix all that up with Mexican/Spanish and you have a very exotic looking little girl (and damn cute if I say so myself)
This is the way I look at it, if the guy is driving through a nice upper class suburb at 2:00 in the morning and a cop pulls him over, does the cop think he’s black? Obama is black.
In America the standard for most people has been one drop. After slavery and all through our Jim Crow days that was a socially and in many states a legal definition.
When I was growing up a 50/50 was called a mulatto. I have not heard that used in years. I think many still think any black at all is black.
I see him as an American politician. (Ditto seeing Tiger Woods as a golfer and Halle Berry as an actress). Not perhaps quite what you were asking perhaps – but (speaking purely IMHO and with perhaps an overly broad brush), many Americans seem oddly hung up on race (defined by skin-tone), as opposed to ethnicity or cultural background.
With regards to Tiger Woods – per Liberal’s comments – wiki states that “Woods [is] one-quarter Chinese, one quarter Thai, one quarter African American, one-eighth Native American, and one-eighth Dutch”. I find the concept of calling him “black” quite mind-boggling.
Halle Berry, whose background is a little similar to Obama’s (raised by her white mother from age 4 after divorce from her African-American father), self identifies as “black”, as is quoted as saying that this arose after “having many talks with my mother… She said that even though you are half black and half white, you will be discriminated against in this country as a black person. People will not know when they see you that you have a white mother unless you wear a sign on your forehead. And, even if they did, so many people believe that you have an ounce of black blood in you then you are black. So, therefore, I decided to let folks categorize me however they needed to.” (bolding mine).
Which again, makes it seem disingenuous to me to refer to him as “black” or “African-American” (even though the latter designation is in some ways quite accurate… although it should perhaps be “African/American”).
:dubious: I seriously doubt the ‘one drop’ rule has been used in quite a long time. If you LOOK white, even if you had a black ancestor 5 generations back, you’d be considered white. Who would know? It isn’t like they make a small portable lab kit that can be used to detect one drop of black blood in a persons veins.
Almost assuredly I have ‘one drop’ of black blood in MY veins (in fact, I know I do as I have a black/Indian ancestor according to my grandmother)…does that make me black? No…because I don’t LOOK black. No one would ever associate me with black…they would guess Mexican (well, ok…no challenge there), or perhaps Spanish/Hispanic…or Greek or Arabic (I’ve been asked in airports from time to time and have noticed a curious trend in searching my luggage and scanning my person…).
ETA:
As for this, I don’t think American’s are as fixated on mixes as they were in Mexico where there are all kinds of terms (like the mulatto one you used here) for the different types of mixes.
-XT
That’s very enlightened of you. But if you saw Tiger Woods as a stranger on the street, without the benefit of Wikipedia genealogy, what would you have guessed his ethnicity to be?
I know the question was asked of someone else, but I certainly wouldn’t think black when looking at Tiger Woods. He looks more Asian to me than anything else. I think I would have guessed 3/4ths Asian and 1/4th black.
Ethnicity? I honestly wouldn’t be sure. In some pictures he reminds me quite a bit of a friend of mine who is 1/2 English, and 1/2 Singapore Chinese / Ceylonese… other pictures would suggest some African heritage, but overall I’d be tending towards a guess of mixed Indian ancestry (subcontinent not indigenous American). Bear in mind that NZ has a very small number people of African descent so I’m less familiar with African-American phenotypes.
But most people don’t see that. I agree that if you look at his facial features alone, he looks more East Asian than anything . But he has dark skin and kinky hair, so most people see him as Black.
Also, keep in mind that there are plenty of Blacks like Louis Gates Jr who is 50/50 genetically, but not because he has one White parent and on Black parent-- maybe he has an equal number of White and Black great-great grandparents or something like that. Almost all US Blacks are part European, and if you look at folks from certain areas of the South (NOLA in particular), there are quite a few Blacks who are obviously more White than Black.
Until 1930 mulatto was a legal census definition. Now an urban definitionwould include halfrican, quadroon and octaroon. Rush Limburger refers to Obama and Halle Berry as Halfricans.
