His father was black and his mother was white, so isn’t Barrack Obama a white man as well?
I will let the historians handle this one, but I think that from the times of slavery, you needed the full pedigree to be white. Any blackness made you black, no matter how little and how far in your genealogy. They had different names for different mixes (in Spanish, mulatos, cuarterones, mestizos, etc), but they were all of color and not white.
People are not merely the average of their two biological parents. If that were the case most of us would be transgendered bisexuals.
Obama is self-identified as a black man (or at least as a “mutt”); that’s all that matters.
In the U.S., we appear to follow what is known as the “one drop” rule in which, as Sapo noted, any mixture regardless how small defaults to being “non-white.” Since race is a social construct, society can impose any rules upon it without regard to rationality or consistency. Given the history of the U.S., that is the current method of identifying a person. The issue has been wrangled over repeatedly in Great Debates and the BBQ Pit.
Note the last two panels of Doonesbury from Wednesday’s paper.
Well, he’s darker than some…even tanned.
Please do not disagree, as we are not allowed to call people imbeciles except in the Pit.
I don’t think we follow the “one drop” rule anymore, but I do think we follow the “looks black” rule.
Obama looks black, therefore he’s treated as a black man, therefore he’s black. He has a (gorgeous) black wife and beautiful black children and black inlaws and neices and nephews. He, up until recently, went to a predominantly black church and worked in black neighborhoods of Chicago. Look at his hotel room while he and his family were watching the election returns. That’s a black family. Nothin’ wrong with that.
If by “white” you mean “of recent European ancestry,” and by “black” you mean “of recent subsaharan African ancestry,” then yes, Obama is both black and white.
If by “black” you mean “a descendant of antebellum American slaves,” and by “white” you mean “a descendant of antebellum American slaveholders,” then Obama would (as far as I know) be neither.
If you’re using a definition of some inclusiveness between these two, then the answer would of course be dependent on what definition you chose. Would you like to clarify how you’re defining “black” and “white”?
Obama is both white and black and as far as I have ever heard the term, it has always been called multiracial or mixed.
Copperwindow I think you may have been the only person to make this obversation.
as with many situations sometimes there is not only white and not only black, but a large swath of gray.
so perhaps a nice shade of gray?
Obama’s an alien?
Although this thread is better suited to GD than GQ, given the number of previous threads on this subject (some of them recent) I am going to invite the OP to do a search there if he is interested in learning more on the topic rather than move this one.
Thread closed.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator