“Ever since he announced he was running for president, Barack Obama‘s blackness has been questioned. Now that he’s about to be president, some people won’t let it go. It started with the silly question of whether Obama was black enough. Back in early 2007, Hillary Clinton was winning the majority of the black vote in opinion polls, and some pundits pushed the ridiculous idea that Obama couldn’t compete with the Clintons in the black community. … While technically Obama is biracial, his racial identity is really whatever race with which he chooses to identify. He identifies as black and, for all intents and purposes, that makes him black.
“The idea that blacks with white blood in them must only be called multiracial instead of black is just as silly as the idea that whites with one drop of black blood in them are black. This is especially true in a culture where most African Americans also have white blood in their ancestry. If the whole conversation about race is based on socially constructed fiction, why shouldn’t Obama be able to identify with whatever aspect of his identity he chooses?” [Keith Boykin, The Daily Voice]
Michael W.
Going by this poster I see floating around on gay blogs and forums, I’d say the gay community is definitely in agreement.
http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/3553/uppitybigotpa9.jpg
Joe Moag
The poster referrenced above is disgusting. Moreover, it cannot be claimed – by those who are going to try and do so – that it merely represents some sort of “justifiable anger” in backlash to Obama’s choice of Warren. Bullshit. You don’t go all the way to using words like “Uppity” and “Negro” out of the blue unless you have felt them in your heart all along.
Rather, the Warren issue is an excuse for some racists in our community to put their sheets back on, as evidenced by this poster.
g_whiz
Woah. I was going to comment that there’s a lot going on with race and identity here than meets the eye, but that poster is absolutley outrageous. I might be deeply troubled by the very presence of Rick Warren at the inaugeration BUT I’m not going to stoop to call someone a “Uppity Negro”. What is this 1940s Birmingham? This is an obvious indication that we as Americans, even when we try, cannot remove race entirely from the picture. I agree with Joe Moag in that one just doesn’t decide arbitrarily to say things like this unless they’ve been harboring such thinking all along.
g_whiz
And the last time I checked, though I never got my membership card in the mail, I, being African American and gay , am part of the gay community. Nobody asked if I found the above poster to be some sort of archly racist consensus, but then thats the beauty of being oblivious to one’s own biases.
Alan down in Florida
Personally I find it very disrespectful to the President-Elect’s own family to present him as the first African-American/Black President. He is mixed race or, as a friend of mine amended, biracial.
He was born of a Caucasian/White mother and, perhaps more importantly, raised by his Caucasian/White grandparents whose love and guidance made him the man he is today and gave him the foundation on which his success was built.
To call him African-American/Black solely because of his skin color is to denigrate the importance of his Caucasian/White bloodlines. Even the POTUS(E)recognizes his mixed heritage and calls himself a “mutt.”
As for the poster, it is beneath contempt.
dizzyspins
While i’d like to believe that a person can claim their own racial identity, the reality in America is you are considered black if you “look” black.
Do you think Obama could identify as “white” and anyone would take it seriously? Does anyone think of Tiger Woods as Asian, even though that’s his predominant heritage? And oddly, Kimora Lee Simmons considers herself black, but the modeling industry and the general public think of her as Asian, because those features are very prominent.
For hundreds of years, from government laws down to the paper-bag test, you were considered black if you had enough black blood in you for it to “show.” That it was some sort of taint that made you impure. To some extent, that’s how most people still see things.
I’m not saying I like it (I dont) but that seems to be the current reality.
jeffrey bryan
For years people have tried to spread the lie that being gay is a choice. Well guess what, it’s not. The choice is how you live your life (afraid and in the dark closet or proud and out in the light). Same thing here, Obama didn’t choose his race, he is bi-racial. That’s a fact. How he chooses to identify and label himself is a different story altogether.
BTW, that poster is offensive and *not* representative. While I absolutely feel the choice of Warren was a slap in the face, that poster was obviously the product of a racist waiting for an opening.
Ted C.
I thought the issue wasn’t whether he was black, but whether he was “African-American”. Neither of his parents were African-American, and he spent his childhood overseas. So when exactly did he become African-American?
Not that I care. His wife is African-American, and so are his kids. Good enough for me.
Ted C.
Also, dizzyspins has it right.
No one considers Nicole Richie black, even though she considers herself black, was raised by a black family, and had mixed-race birth parents.
Also, if you were really free to choose whatever racial identity you wanted, K-Fed would be calling himself black.
msim
I strongly believe one has a right to identify as whatever one chooses. Identities are political and social. They are determined by who we are and, in this society, by what we appear to be.
If, in his experience, Obama got treated all his life as a black man in America, then he has certainly the right to call himself so.
There was this great doc on PBS (African-American Lives) with Prof. Henry Louis Gates. His DNA test proved him to be mostly white-Irish but since both his parents are black and he lives in the USA, he identifies as black. It’s been his experience.
Racial/sexual/gender parameters in the USA are absurd and the prejudices that feed them have little to do with the reality/complexity of who we truly are and how we live our lives.
As a group that has been labelled less than savoury names for centuries, I would think we wouldn’t begrudge someone the right to identify as he pleases.
My longest post ever on Queerty.
John from England(used to be just John but there are other John's)
@msim:
“If, in his experience, Obama got treated all his life as a black man in America, then he has certainly the right to call himself so.”
Exactly.
It’s like that in the UK. I have so many mixed raced friends who’ve NEVER met or bring with their black parent but because they look brown….are BLACK.
But their is such a thing as black being a ‘culture’..which again is mainly from the ancestry of that blackness-which in the US, UK and West Indies is West Africa.
Obama’s dad is East African.
That is as different and far away as a Swede and an italian; not just distance but culture.
But hey ho!?
g_whiz
Great dialouge here, ladies and gents. I’m finding it very informative. Dizzyspins is entirely correct, within the confines of American culture, the One Drop Rule still has some degree of weight. Being blackness, and being black biologically are different, but often treated as being synonomus. To personalize, I grew up in the suburbs of Charleston WV. In One of two black families. I would often get puzzled reactions from teenaged white kids about how I didn’t “sound black”, and got a fair ammount of rejection because I didn’t live up to others expectations of “authentic blackness”, however I also got called slurs just as much. Its impossible to divorce oneself from the biological aspects of race (as much as there actually are biological aspects), but the cultural aspects can vary dramatically. Because one does not perscribe to the typical urban stereotype does not make one any less biologically anything. Its a suggestion that would be laughable if it wasn’t so dense.
Coromandel
African-American re Obama … think Anglo-American, someone who is half-English and half-American … his father was Kenyan, his mother was American, so he could be African-American for the sake of argument … or Kenyan-American … or just Obama. That last one’s enough for me.
afrolito
I find it funny that some white people are questioning his obvious blackness. If he had lost the election, he would have certainly been called the black man who came close and lost it.
In the real world people are judged by what they look like, and if Obama was walking down any street in America, he’d be just another black guy. No one would ever look at him and think he had a white mom from the midwest. Most black people in the americas are of mixed racial heritage, so Obama is not a special case. Would it make white people feel better about their choice if he called himself biracial?
Ryan Moon
If Obama isn’t black then neither are his children. To go by percentages, for the sake of argument, Obama’s children are “25% white”. How come then people don’t argue that is children “aren’t black”. From eyeballing the local African American population, I would say a plurality look like Obama’s children, yet I can say with almost absolute certainty that the people living here view them as black. In accordance with the argument that Obama isn’t black because he is “50 percent white” wouldnt the same argument hold for a sizable number of African Americans who have white ancestry whether the white ancestry is 50% or 10%? In other words, why is someone 50% white and 50% black “not black”, yet someone 75% black and 25% white seen “as black”? And who is to enforce these blood quantums? I personally don’t think African Americans go around on witch hunts to figure out who is “100% black” and who is not. I have personally never met a black person who thinks in strict percentages. If anything, I’ve met black people who think in terms of nationality: “I am 100% Jamaican; I am 100% Somali, etc”. NEVER have I met a black person say: “You are only 98% black? Then I don’t accept you because I only accept 100% blacks”. The phrase “100% black” is ludicrous.
[email protected]
obama is a fucking idiot
grlygrl0630
What’s wrong with just being AMERICAN. It seems like just being plain, old American isn’t good enough for the majority of the black community. Historically for so long they were set aside from the rest of America, and their ancestors fought fearlessly against that segregation. Now that the rest of America is pretty much color blind, THEY want to set themselves apart from America again???… WHY don’t they just want to be identified as AMERICANS, like the rest of us. This doesn’t make sense to me. My father was from Italy, I don’t go around calling myself an “Italian American”. I’m an AMERICAN. I’m proud of my heritage, but I’m also PROUD to be an AMERICAN. America was founded by Europeans, why don’t people of European descent call themselves “European American”, or “Anglo American”. Calling myself anything other than AMERICAN would be like spitting in the faces of all those soldiers that died (black and white), so we could have the PRIVILEDGE to call ourselves AMERICANS. Anything else is unpatriotic and un-American…so I guess our new President is UN-AMERICAN! Why do ANY of you BLACK Americans call yourself AFRICAN AMERICAN, if you’re not from Africa?!?! Don’t you understand that if you were BORN in AMERICA – LEGALLY YOU ARE AN AMERICAN. If we went to war with Africa, you would hve to fight on the side of AMERICA. That would never happen, but you get the point…I HOPE. Isn’t just being AMERICAN good enough for the new President?..
grlygrl0630
Could SOMEONE PLEASE tell me why being just “AMERICAN” isn’t GOOD ENOUGH for Barack Obama?…Why is our PRESIDENT making RACE an ISSUE. It should have nothing to do with it! Right?…isn’t that what black Americans are saying, “race should have nothing to do with judging what kind of President he will be”. Yet leave it to our new President to take it back to RACE, by calling himself “African American”. What’s WRONG with just AMERICAN??…and that goes for ALL AMERICANS, why do some of you set yourself aside from the rest of Americans according to your race, THEN get disgruntled if you are treated differently. If you want to be called something diferent than the rest of all of us Americans, then, well if the shoe fits…
Robspace1
If
Eric
The problem is Obama isn’t the claimed 50%, 25% or even 1/8th Black. People automatically make the assumption because his skin is darker that they dismiss any questions when he says he’s Black. In truth he’s 1/16th black, which LEGALLY is not considered black. He could legally consider himself white/caucasian or Arabic.
Personally I don’t care what race he is, but what does it say about a man who lies about his Race for personal gain. In his acceptance to go to school, political advancement.. If he is willing to lie about something as simple and trivial as what race he is, what will he do about something that actually matters?
What makes him dangerous is that he’s a great speaker, but don’t take his word for gospel. Do some simple research, and form a balanced opinion. If you still have that much faith in what he says I’ll be honestly surprised.