Are there any black Dopers who think Obama's not "black enough"?

[Indistinguishable]

To put it another way: it’s new and interesting to me. Even if it’s mundane old hat to you.

(And, yeah, I realize the weirdness of discussing “sub-Saharan ancestry” if this is used in a way that doesn’t track cladistic categories, but, well… them’s the breaks; racial labelling is weird)

[MrDibble]

Tell me about it

[John_Mace]

@Indistinguishable

To put it another way: it’s new and interesting to me. Even if it’s mundane old hat to you.

(And, yeah, I realize the weirdness of discussing “sub-Saharan ancestry” if this is used in a way that doesn’t track cladistic categories, but, well… them’s the breaks; racial labelling is weird)

Well, even in the crude, early 20th century racial categories, you would often find “Capoid” as distinct from “Negroid”. This has been around for a long time, but doesn’t get much play in everyday life in the US, where we’re just getting beyond the fact that the issue of race is not so Black and White (if you catch my drift).

[Onomatopoeia]

@Indistinguishable

Is that meant to be a correction to my offering of two possibilities? Well, depending on how exactly he looks, how he chose to self-identify, and the exact details of his background, it seems to me plausible that he might be called “multiracial” in certain contexts, even while being called “black” without reservation in others or even simultaneously, the way, say, Tiger Woods or Halle Berry are described. But what do I know?

Not that any of it has any particularly concrete significance, but as far as the question of typical American racial-labelling behavior goes, that seems to me the answer.

A correction, only in that such nuances are completely lost on most Americans. The perspective of the hoi polloi is you are what you look like, for the most part, and if there’s enough ambiguity to negate a positive racial ID, telltale physical attributes (eg: hair texture) are used as an anchoring point.

[amarinth]

I disagree with “black enough,” as others in the thread have said black enough for what, exactly?

But I do think there can be, and often times is, a difference between how America is perceived and approached by someone who came here voluntarily in the the past 25 years and someone whose family has been here and experienced all that has happened in this country for over 200.

I also do see differences in the way that more recent African immigrants are treated to their face and discussed behind their back and the way that descendants of slaves are.

(BTW, most of us would easily recognize that there would be differences in a recent immigrant from England’s “American experience” and “American experience” of someone who had family on the Mayflower. Why is it so bizarre to think that there might be differences for people with dark skin?)