He’s clueless and the event didn’t directly concern or benefit him, so it doesn’t enter his awareness.
Not my culture or family history so I won’t go into details I’d likely get wrong but some people draw a distinction between those Americans who are descendants of slaves in this country and those who are descendants of people who were not US slaves. This is not, from my observation, anything close to a universal opinion among Black people, whether or not they fall into the category of “descended from slaves”. This came up with Barack Obama as well, being a descendant of a recent African immigrant rather than slaves. People outside of the ethnic and cultural group for whom this is important frequently don’t see it and don’t get it. I don’t have a personal opinion on this except that I acknowledge that the viewpoint exists.
I’m not sure a White boy should be attempting to make those sorts of distinctions to a Black audience.
There are still times and places when race matters in this country whether or not it should.
Actually, Obama is half Black and half White. It’s a legacy of the US-style of slavery and the one-drop rule that there is this notion that one MUST be JUST ONE racial category. Mixed race people people have long been pressured to identify solely with one side of their heritage in this country, and never with the White part of it. The reasons why this is so are probably not on topic here.
You could see this with Trump who in that interview keep on and on about how Kamala said she was Indian until “suddenly” she said she was Black. It’s like he can’t understand that she is both. She has always been both. Other countries who do not share the same racial hang-ups as the US usually wrap their heads around this much better than the US does.
First of all, Jamaica had chattel slavery every bit as brutal and dehumanizing as that in the United States. Maybe splitting those hairs matters to some, but if we’re talking about “descent from chattel slaves” then Kamala qualifies. Now, the social structure of Jamaica post-slavery was and is different than that of the US and maybe there’s a context where that makes a difference, I wouldn’t know, but anyone asserting that there weren’t chattel slaves in Harris’ ancestry is ignorant of even superficial knowledge of Jamaican history.
With Mr. Obama there is a distinction that I think is sometimes lost on us White folk who, when asked about our ancestry, can provide some detail. I don’t refer to myself as “European-American”, I can say my paternal grandparents were Russian Jews, Jewish subtype Ashkenazi, and my maternal grandfather came from Germany, and my maternal grandmother was a descendant of Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Hunger/Potato Famine in the mid 1800’s. Meanwhile, when growing up if I asked some of my Black classmates where in the world their ancestors came from the answer was a very non-specific “Africa”. Where in Africa? What nations or languages? No one knew, that information was deliberately destroyed. Some were lighter-skinned and might have known they has Irish or English ancestry… but usually unspoken, but known (certainly known to adults), was that that heritage was the result of a master raping one of their female ancestors. Now, I don’t know what to tell you if you can’t see the distinction there, but it makes a mystery of a family’s past with a dollop of sexual violence on top. Mr. Obama, however, does not share that cultural amputation - he can say he is “Kenyan-American”, he knows exactly where his father came from, he knows the particular ethnic group his father is from, he has been back to visit his African family, and his family wound up in America not via kidnapping but by his father choosing to pursue education here. In that, Obama is closer to a White American of European descent than the millions of people who history was ripped from their ancestors. Sure, Obama has faced the racist disadvantages a dark skin gets you in the US but his family’s experience isn’t necessarily typical of that of most people viewed as Black in the US.
Is that a distinction worth making? Apparently to some people. Almost certainly in some contexts.
^ This.
For 500 years White people in power in North America have been making the decisions on who is and isn’t this or that racial group.
Yes, but the presence and role of free Black people in Jamaican society even while there was chattel slavery, when and how slavery ended in Jamaica, and the society that grew out of those changes were significantly different than what happened in the US.
I can say the same - I know different White people than you do. While far from universal there are some very racist White folks who still very much subscribe to the one drop rule. We have even had a discussion about White men who wouldn’t date or associate with a White woman who had ever dated, much less had a more involved relationship, with a Black man in the past here on the Dope.. The person who made post #160 in that thread was pretty clear on his views. That was a mere 10 years ago. Apparently the “one drop” he objected to wasn’t blood but other bodily fluid(s).
Well, the US is a country of 330 million people spread over most of a continent, I would expect there to be different sorts and different experiences.