[QUOTE=pizzabrat]
And if they were identify solely as their other halves (especially if their other halves are white), would you accept that? Would you participate in referring to them that way to others?
[/QUOTE]
Sure, absolutely. And no, I’m not answering that way because it’s a hypothetical. I have several friends of mixed race, some identify as “black”, some as “white” and some as “just me.” Just like gender or name, my reaction is to shrug and go with what makes the person’s world work. If Mr. Obama feels his experiences are that of a black man, then he’s black in my book.
Of course a lot of the experiences one has has to do with what the person looks like - because that’s what determines how other people react to them. My friend Mark is a dark skinned (no more multiracial than any black kid who doesn’t know their family tree) black man adopted as an infant and raised in a white household in a white city. But he says he can’t see himself as “white” or fully a part of the white culture he grew up in because people still flinch and cross the street when he’s out walking after dark. Even though he and I were neighbors growing up, the difference in our skin color means we will never have corresponding social, vocational or judicial experiences. The question I think a lot of people (at least I, a white girl, do) have of Barak Obama is does he get treated like “a black man”? If not, than I’d be sorely disappointed if he were to try and use his African ancestry to appeal to the black voters as “one of them”. His story about finding it hard to hail a cab in Chicago (if true) answers my question: he’s as “not white” as Mark in experience, no matter who raised him or where.
