Yep. Haven’t I heard people bitch about Tiger Woods for not self-identifying as black? It would seem they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
As you are replying to someone who was replying to me, I want to note for the record: I have already said that someone in a situation like this is in a double bind.
-FrL-
Sorry to be repetitive.
Slight hijack, but is it only blacks that can be African-Americans? What about whites like Kim du Toit, born and bred over there, now an American citizen? Or ethnic Egyptians? Arabs / Semites?
As it happens, there was an opinion piece in Salon.com recently discussing Obama’s “blackness,” or lack thereof—the latter being the author’s stated opinion. (The full article requires viewing a brief ad, if you don’t have a subscription.)
The author, Debra J. Dickerson, is black—not that this makes her an expert on All Things Black, of course, and not that I necessarily agree with her thesis. But it is a subject that generates debate, apparently, and judging from the 438 user comments posted on the article so far, a good deal of controversy.
Oh, and megadittoes on Rush being a fucking piece of shit. At least he never disappoints.
Yup.
From that Salon piece:
I knew I wasn’t completely crazy, anyway.
-FrL-
The key point of the discussion being, of course, that when a black person and Rush Limbaugh make exactly the same point, one in a humorous manner and the other in the usual tiresome pedantic way, Rush is a fucking piece of shit and the black person is “controversial”.
Face it - “Halfrican-American” is funny. And the whole race pimp approach to politics (not Obama, political whores like Sharpton and Jesse) falls apart once the first genuine snicker is heard.
Regards,
Shodan
Has this really been your experience? Have you ever seen anyone NOT refer to Africans as black?
If the writer of that Salon piece was talking about the term African-American I would be in whole-hearted disagreement. A-A, in my experience, is used only to refer to the descendants of slaves brought to the US in the 1800’s and before.
But black? The idea that that term too is only reserved for the descendants of slaves is completely foreign to me. I’m sure John Mace even agrees with me on this.
And please also keep in mind that this writer’s opinion is about as representative of black people’s attitudes towards Obama’s blackness as Rush Limbaugh’s opinion is representative of what whites think. Like I said before, most black people from what I can tell do not put a whole lot of thought into how black Obama is. You’ll see proportionately more whites challenging him on what he calls himself than black, I guarrantee it.
I don’t know that Rush and the author were making “exactly the same point,” actually. From his long history as a shameless butt-pipe of a Republican shill, I assume that Rush’s main “point” with a remark like that is to publicly ridicule a Democrat who happens to be a candidate for President. Any sage social commentary or penetrative satire inherent in the word “Halfrican,” if it exists, is incidental.
If it exists. Facing middle age, I’m still embarrasingly drawn to very low humor, but I just don’t find “Halfrican-American” to be all that funny or clever. It’s something one might hear from an unexceptional fifth-grader who, not getting the laugh he expected, then retaliates by jamming his thumb into your salisbury steak.
I don’t think he’s specifically trying to undermine Obama’s appeal to African-Americans, but he is probably trying to establish a meme. If Obama gets the Democratic nomination, he will likely attract a higher than average African-American turnout, and that will be disadvantegeous to Republicans. Limbaugh may not be able to appeal directly to Blacks to convince them that Obama isn’t “one of them,” but if he can help get the ball rolling on a catchy meme, he does his part in helping others make that argument.
This isn’t a question so much of denotation as it is one of connotation. “Black” may refer to skin tone, but it connotes a (family of) cultural identification(s).
Or another way to analyze it may be as follows. The word “black” serves several purposes. One of them is to mark off a family of cultural identities. Another of them is to mark off a family of skin tones.
To identify someone as “black” based on their skin tone is also to imply that they are “black” culturally speaking, even if it is not, strictly speaking, to say that they are “culturally black.”
This is why you knew exactly what the author meant when she called Obama “‘Black’ but not black.”
-FrL-
I should note here: I don’t think there’s a such thing as a single “black culture.” Hence all the scare quotes. I do think popular usage presumes there is a single such culture, though.
It’s obvious that black has little to do with appearance. Michael Jackson is a black man, after all.
The cultural aspect of being black is really only a minor part of why most blacks are called black. In fact, I’d say it’s really not essential at all. A black kid raised in a white home would only be laughed at if he called himself white. Likewise, a white kid raised in a black home is not going to be considered black.
In the US, a black person is defined by their ancestry. Not their appearance or culture. Appearance and culture have a lot to do with how someone self-identifies, and this gets into the political component of race. But appearance and culture don’t determine whether you are black.
I disagree that black is really used to refer to a “family of skin tones”. Rarely (if ever) in the US are dark-skinned Indians called black, for instance. Whites who spend a lot of time in the sun are darker than many black people, but we don’t go around describing their complexions as black. That’s becuase “black” refers more to ancestry than color. A lot of white people don’t understand this, and I don’t know why.
Are you confusing “culture” with “ancestry”? Because I don’t know how you would be able to tell who is “culturally” black or not, when as you admit, defining black culture is such a difficult if not impossible thing to do. What we call “black culture” (think certain styles of music, art, speech patterns, food, etc.) really is a subset of American culture. Anyone that’s grown up in an area with a strong A-A influence will undoubtedly partake in some of this “black culture”, but that doesn’t make them black.
Not because of culture. Read her article again and you’ll see that her point is not that Obama isn’t culturally black. It’s that he is not a descendant of West African slaves. In other words, it’s a matter of ancestry not cultural identification (or having a white parent, which Rush intimated). Like I said before, if she were talking about the legitimacy of Obama calling himself an A-A, I would agree with her. But when it comes to race, there is no problem with Obama saying he’s black. He’s as black as anyone else who traces ancestry to Africa and is called black by the greater society.
By the way, an interesting book on the subject of self-identification is “Life on the Color Line” by Gregory Williams. It’s about a black man who looks phenotypically like a white person, and yet he calls himself black–not because of culture–but because that’s how people treated him in the small prejudiced town he grew up in. It didn’t matter that he looked white; he had a black dad and hence he was black too, in the eyes of the world.
Regarding the ancestry/culture thing: Do you understand what is meant when someone says “She is black, but she acts white” or “He is white, but he acts black?”
-FrL-
Yeah, I know what folks are talking about.
Are you saying Obama “acts white” and that’s why it’s problematic that he is called black? Is that your point?
Alessan writes:
> This did not apply to other ethnic groups - while Halle Berry is always black,
> actors Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Tilly and Dean Cain, who each have one Asian
> parent, are never called “Asian-American.”
Well, to get picky here, only Jennifer Tilly among the ones you name is actually half-Asian. Jennifer Tilly (and her sister Meg Tilly) have a Chinese father. Dean Cain has a Japanese grandfather, so he’s only one-quarter Asian. Keanu Reeves is less than one-quarter Asian. One grandparent is Portuguese, Chinese, and Hawaiian in ancestry.
Yeah, even* I would agree with you on that point. Although, not having read the article, it’s possible that the writer was assuming that the context of the discussion was social conditions in the US. If that’s the case, then I wouldn’t find it odd at all.
But is that really your experience with the term African-American? You’ve never, for instance, heard Colin Powell referred to as an African-American? If I were to refer to him thusly, say in the context of a discussion about Affirmative Action, would you correct me and say that he isn’t an African-American?
*I laughed when I saw that, btw, as if I represented some extreme viewpoint on the subject. I’m sure you didn’t meant it that way, but it could be interpreted to mean that.
Yeah, I have heard Powell called that. I’ve also heard of folks calling people like Nelson Mandela an “Arican-American” Now I’m sure we both can agree that that’s just wrong, right? 
I think most of the time when people call non-slave descendants A-A, they do so because they are either ignorant of that person’s origins (and are assuming that they are “regular American black”) or because they are just plain sloppy with language (as in the case of Mandela being called A-A)
It depends on what you were actually saying, but yes, I tend to agree that Obama calling himself A-A goes against what that term most commonly represents and I would correct you if were insisting that he is an A-A. But it’s hardly something that I’d lose sweat and tears over. It’s semantics. And if Obama called me and told me that he was an A-A, I wouldn’t argue with him at all.
Naw, I was just foolin’. You’re not extreme at all. If anything you’re pretty generous with your terminology because of your opinion that A-A applies to all blacks in this country, while I say “no way jose”.
No doubt that’s most of the issue - basing your interpretation on assumptions about the author is going to change if you assume different things about different authors.
NPR says it, you assume one thing, Rush says the same thing, you assume something else.
Like I said, people who want to take offense are compelled to deny that this kind of a pun could be funny. Extremists can’t have a sense of humor about themselves (or their pets or pet causes), or they wouldn’t be extremists.
Regards,
Shodan
No, my only point with that last question was to show that there is a cultural connotation to the word “black” and not just an ancestral one. (We don’t generally chalk patterns of behavior like those being referred to up to ancestry, but rather, to something more like cultural upbringing or cultural identification.)
I don’t believe there is a such thing as “acting white” or “acting black,” and it follows from that that I am not saying that Obama “acts white.” Nor do I think that’s what anyone might ever complain about with regard to him. I’m just making the point that “Black” has a cultural connotation. To identify someone as “black” is to identify them as having a certain ancestry, just as you say,* but that’s not all that’s involved in that act of identification, in many cases.
Let me not be misunderstood. Obama is black. I haven’t meant to say he’s not. What I’ve been trying to say is that his being black is politically problematic in a way that would not be there to be a problem for someone who was born here, the descendant of slaves.
-FrL-
*You were right to correct my language on this point. If someone looks “black” to me, but I find out their ancestors are from Australia and not from Africa, then I would not judge them to be “black” after all.