Here's a wake-up call on the state of race in America: Why is it that Obama, half-black and half-white, is the "black" candidate who is being asked to represent blacks in America? Why is it that it is so readily accepted that he's "black," when his mother, his grandparents and the household he grew up in are all white? Why is it that being half-black makes you fully black, yet being half-white doesn't make you white at all?
I, like Obama, am a bi-racial American, the product of a black father and a white mother. To put it succintly, I identify more as a "black" American, as the black community was the one to more readily accept me, and that I was always treated as black by other communities, the police, etc.
But it's an interesting thought. In Australia, an Aboriginal with a few drops of white blood is considered white, yet in America, a white person with a few drops of black blood is considered black. We are marginalised away from being white which is held up as some standard of perfection only to be reached if one is pure, and so, being half-white isn't good enough. I have to be fully white.
Funny thing is, while I call myself black, I''m not really black. The black community has accepted me, though there has always been an unspoken, undefined line between us. I was never given the "fear the police and watch out for white people who'll try to kill you!" growing up, I was always told I could be whatever I wanted to be, so I lack the anger many blacks have. I lack the self-confidence problems that plague many blacks and cause them to act out and be retaliated against, having always expected that retaliation.
No, I sit on a unique fence inbetween the races, accepted with some reservation on one side and, on the other, pushed away in to the group that would take me. Obama, in his book "Dreams From My Father," speaks of walking a similar line. Not one and yet not the other. But, as the "black" candidate, he is asked to speak for all of black America, to heal the racial wounds and relate black anger to white Americans, all things that he's had no part in and only a tangential understanding of.
In other words, institutionalised racism is alive and well in this country, including in how we see our candidates in "black or white." Obama is neither, yet he has been forced on to one side by a media that has never even questioned why it did so. If a candidate was half-Mexican and half-Indian, people would want to know more about their upbringing and look at them as two unique races. Yet, if you're half-white, mixed with anything, that side may as well not exist as the country looks at you as existing fully in the domain of the non-white race.
Food for thought.