I was born to an African father and a white mother... sound familiar
Bi-racial people is a growing race of people. Barely acknowledged 100 years ago bi-racial people are growing in number and bringing complexity and nuance to the discussion of race. As we bring the nuance and complexity by our very existence. For some time now bi-racial people have ignited curiosity and scorn.
The Bi-Racial Future/ Bi-racial World Domination
Until very recently, words like mixed-race, biracial and multiracial were barely heard of and "interracial" was still considered somethng very, very evil. But today, with millions of biracial births every year, bi-racial people are growing into a force to be reckoned with.
http://www.biracialworlddomination.com/
The 2000 U.S. Census was the first time Americans were allowed to identify themselves as "multiracial," and more than six million people checked more than one box in the race and ethnicity category.
Included in the multiracial category is Sen. Barack Obama.
With a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, Obama is the nation's first biracial candidate for president. The media, however, have continually called Obama the nation's first major party "black candidate," saying he could make history as the first "black president." But is that accurate? As reported by CNN
Still there are 6 million people in US who are bridging race and ethnicity another racial identity.
I had an heated discussion this week with my friend and co-worker a black women from the Caribbean who thought there was too much emphasis on Barack Obama's white family... "he's a black man... they see him as a black man"
I couldn't disagree with her and speaking up for my race (bi-racial people naturally) I stated, "but that is his life, his white family is his life."
Gary Kamiya a bi-racial man of white and Japanese descent wrote recently in Salon:
Of all the qualities a president needs, self-knowledge may be the most important: It's the foundation of everything else. And Obama's self-knowledge is all the more impressive because he had to work so hard to gain it. "Dreams From My Father" is the story of Obama's personal evolution from parochialism to a universal humanism. It's also the story of how a man blessed with a powerful analytical mind developed emotional intelligence along the way. Obama's tortured interior quest forced him to stare down all the demons in his, and America's, racial closet.
In "Dreams From My Father" Obama writes about an exchange with a mixed-race student named Joyce where he asks her if she's going to the Black Students' Association meeting. Joyce replies, "I'm not black, I'm multiracial," she asks why she should have to choose between her two parents. Obama writes, "It sounded real good, until you noticed that [those who said this] avoided black people. It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street ... Only white culture could be nonracial ... And we, the half-breeds and the college degrees, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don't have to?"
Obama's comment about getting lumped in with the losers...hmmm... problematic AND illustrates a developmental task bi-racial people most always grapple with... the notion of being a race traitor.
But Obama himself is honest enough to grapple with this same criticism, and ultimately arrives at a much more nuanced and sympathetic take on the different choices mixed-race people make. "I knew I was being too hard on poor Joyce. The truth was I understood her, her and all the other black kids who felt the way she did," he writes. "In their mannerisms, in their speech, in their mixed-up hearts, I kept recognizing pieces of myself. And that's exactly what scared me. Their confusion made me question my racial credentials all over again."
Race credentials ...another developmental task
Shelby Steele, who like Obama is the child of a white mother and black father in his short book "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win," he argues that Obama's attempt to have it both ways -- to be at once black and not-black a double bind to simultaneously assert black solidarity and a universal identity.
Though Shelby had a problem with this...from a political perspective, I assert this is exactly the appropriate position for the first bi-racial president to take.
Uriah Fields asks in The Home Page of George Edward Loper: Is Barack Obama Black or White?
The natural truth classification holds that Obama is at least fifty percent white. Americans have been acculturated and led to believe that what is politically imposed upon them about race is culturally correct. This writer makes an appeal to black and white people to immediately accept this natural selection paradigm regarding race and declare that Obama is white. In making this declaration recognition is given to the fact that the political classification of Obama as being black is wrong and that his scientific and natural classification is white. (In the meantime fellow-Americans may continue to call this writer black, even though my paternal great-grandfather is white.)
Black and white Americans are urged to use their new-found race-consciousness to declare often and forthrightly that Obama is white. With this enlightenment it should not be a problem for blacks to call Obama a white candidate for president since many of them have accepted what some of their black leaders' reasoning that former President William Bill Clinton was a "black president." Like former President Clinton, Obama has a white mother but unlike him he has a black father. So, if for black people Clinton whose parents are white can be their black president how much more realisitic and easier it woud be for them to accept Obama whose mother is white as a white presidential candidate. I hope and request that Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., and Rev. Al Sharpton will participate in this endeavor to declare that Obama is white.
So I get his point...Barack Obama is as black as he is white. He could possibly be the first black president or the 44th white president. "He can't say, 'I'm a white guy named Barack Hussein Obama,' nobody's going to buy that," says cultural critic Michaela Angela Davis. "We're not ready for that."
Obama has worked hard to keep race out of this his campaign. And this campaign is putting race front and centre and confronting racism by it's very existence. I am encouraged by the discussions even though there is too much discussion about reverse racism... which doesn't exist... but that is for another day and another diary.