Black, white or neither? The mixed race dilemma »
Posted By Spadecaller 1 year, 1 month ago in Political News
Barack Obama is continually referred to as the first African-American or “black” president of the United States. It seems pedantic, and something worse, to argue that Obama is, in fact, mixed race. In some mouths this sounds like - and probably is - an attempt to deprive black people of a victory. It's a bit like when the inevitable stupid soul, unaware of the origin of the term, objects that, since Arabs are Semites, one cannot appropriate “anti-Semitism” to mean Jew-hatred. I always suspect the motives behind such plausibility.
Barack Obama has identified himself as a ‘mutt'. We, too, should acknowledge our fastest-growing ethnic minority...
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Spadecaller
Welcome to my profile. About me: I'm an artist of several kinds; from bull to painting. I don't spare too many words. Most ...
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Spadecaller1 year, 1 month ago
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Obama actually is a genuine African-American since his father was a Kenyan and his mother came from the USA. Some Americans hate the concept that anyone in this country should have a hyphenated ethnic description as they think it is un-American. Is it?
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gamahuche1 year, 1 month ago
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A very timely post, Spade!
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I was habitually trying to make this point on a number of threads from the very beginning of Obama's candidacy but no one ever picked up on it so I let it go.
A positive point of view is that everybody who is black OR white can choose to identify with him on the basis of colour. He is black/he is white. Of course that can be spun to say that he is NEITHER black nor white.
He did that pretty darned effectively and should have been able to disarm anyone with a smidgen of sentimentality in their personal constitution with his puppy comment:
FTA:
And then, last week, safely selected and elected, the Obamas went dog-hunting. One option was a “shelter-dog”. “A lot of shelter-dogs are mutts,” the President-elect said. “Like me.”
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NB - "safely selected!" - He was NOT making an electioneering issue to appeal to the Puppy Lovers of America - of whom I would be the HONORARY president without a doubt, even in absentia, but it was an adorable remark and has me blowing my nose even in rereading..
Since I appear to have digressed even more than usual - my answer to your question, Spade,
and I write this with our little all-black mutt shelter dog threatening to regurgitate something on my feet, is that it is ultimately THE most American behaviour to accept and cherish and enjoy all kinds of people of the utmost variety and diversity and beauty and sacredness and their peculiarity and bizarreness and waywardness - and to celebrate and enjoy them for their specialness and their fascination and to let them make stars and icons of themselves of them and to make the world a place of variety and excitement and newness and differences and acceptance and tolerance.
THAT is the USA that everybody loves and respects. The whole world needs it back again and it must be rescued from the nay-saying-not-so-tender-and-not-so-loving-care that it has been suffering from for the last 8 terribly long years. -
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wtagg1 year, 1 month ago
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If equality is desired in this country, we need to work at identifying ourselves as equals. As long as groups work to self-segregate, that goal can never be obtained. It is self-defeating. That includes gender, race, religion, sexual preference, age group, etc...
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Judge on performance and actions. -
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hyperbola1 year, 1 month ago
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I always wondered why the concept of the mulatto was so widespread in the world, but ignored like the plague in the US. Poltiics I suppose. Or provincialism. Americans are awfully isolated from the rest of the world and this makes it easier to create and propagate "national myths".
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uncle-dave1 year, 1 month ago
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President elect Obama is black because of the “one drop” rule. He identifies himself as black because our society mandates that if you have one drop of African blood you are black.
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As Langston Hughes wrote, "You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word 'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_drop_rule
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Poulenc1 year, 1 month ago
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I struggle with this one all the time. As Uncle-Dave so rightly put it, here in the good 'ol US of A the "one drop" rule rules--and Obama himself is, as stated, black-identified.
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But, really, he's as white as he's black. The issue, though, is the fact of his mixed ancestry, a paradigm whose reverb is enormous and will become even more so as American society looses it's "pure" white face (literally and figuratively).
Which it's doing more and more every day. -
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RickyDawkins1 year, 1 month ago
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Because humans originated in Africa, the genetic diversity in Africa is much greater than in Asia or Europe, which were first settled only 30,000 years ago.
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Men pass their Y chromosome on to all of their sons from generation to generation. Historically speaking, all men descended from a single man who lived 60-70,000 years ago in Africa, and everyone in the world descends from that one man. However, as man evolved since our "Genetic Adam", small changes (aka mutations) have taken place which separate all males into 18 highly-defined branches, called Haplogroups.
http://www.africandna.com/-
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CRYMTYPHON1 year, 1 month ago
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I sat behind Dawkins in bio 101, but I couldn't copy his answers because he wrote backwards in french, the rat.
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If you take his big-picture view, the hyphen-american issue does seem to be on the order of what moose-lodge you joined; (ie: artificial silliness).
But, then, we jump back to the small picture.
Try being an african american and walk into a diner ;
when you know everyone is thinking, 'i didn't know they used this place. . -
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slate1 year, 1 month ago
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not2needy1 year, 1 month ago
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The reality here is that none of us are pure breds anymore, basically we're all mutts.
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Many slave owners had children by their female slaves, that pretty much ended the pure breds in this country.
And for once i agree with RD. We all originated from Africa, and when DNA has been compared, we're all brothers and sisters, however distantly related it may be.
People aren't born prejudice, it's taught, and that's the real crime. -
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NoWayMan1 year, 1 month ago
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I'm tri-racial and wouldn't have it any other way. when people ask me my racial make-up ("what are you?) I'm more than happy to oblige the conversation. sometimes, instead of saying my true racial make-up I simply say that I'm America 2.0.
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and, when it comes to Obama, who cares since most black americans are mixed race anyway, usually with native-american blood as well as white blood.
its america. its who we are.
its all good. -
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Spadecaller1 year, 1 month ago
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"THE most American behaviour to accept and cherish and enjoy all kinds of people of the utmost variety and diversity and beauty and sacredness and their peculiarity and bizarreness and waywardness - and to celebrate and enjoy them for their specialness and their fascination and to let them make stars and icons of themselves of them and to make the world a place of variety and excitement and newness and differences and acceptance and tolerance."
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Well said gamahuche! AS you well know, those are my sentiments. Those that insist that we should not celebrate our diversity are truly missing out. I enjoy it when I see a young person who knows their roots and can appreciate where they came from.
I suspsect that those who are threatened or annoyed by it, must feel a sense of jealousy. Perhaps they missed out on that experience of learning from their grandparents and their elders.
Despite the fact that my family tree was obliterated only a few generations ago due to the pogroms and the holocaust, the experience of our few survivors was vitally important. And, the richness of learning collectively with others from my own background provided a love and appreciation of our emerging identities. WE all learn from others... not just the shortcomings and prejudices, but the skills, talents, and the wisdom of tradition and the stories, both real and fictitious.-
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hyperbola1 year, 1 month ago
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But Spade, you do not apply this in your very own life. You claim special privileges for some ethnic and relgious groups.
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Why Israel Has No "Right to Exist" as a Jewish State
By OREN BEN-DOR
... A recognition of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state is a recognition of the Jews special entitlement, as eternal victims, to have a Jewish state. Such a test of supreme stake for Jews is the supreme criterion not only for racist policy making by the legislature but also for a racist constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court.The idea of a state that is first and foremost for the sake of Jews trumps even that basic law of Human Freedom and Dignity to which the Israeli Supreme Court pays so much lip service. Such constitutional interpretation would have to make the egalitarian principle equality of citizenship compatible with, and thus subservient to, the need to maintain the Jewish majority and character of the state...
... In our world, a world that resisted Apartheid South Africa so impressively, recognition of the right of the Jewish state to exist is a litmus test for moderation and pragmatism. The demand is that Palestinians recognise Israel's entitlement to constitutionally entrench a system of racist basic laws and policies, differential immigration criteria for Jews and non-Jews, differential ownership and settlements rights, differential capital investments, differential investment in education, formal rules and informal conventions that differentiate the potential stakes of political participation, lame-duck academic freedom and debate...
... The path of two states is the path of separation.Its realisation would mean the entrenchment of exclusionary nationalism for many years. It would mean that the return of the dispossessed and the equality of those who return and those non-Jew-Arabs who are now there would have to be deferred indefinitely consigned to the dusty shelved of historical injustices.Such a scenario is sure to provoke more violence as it would establish the realisation and legitimisation of Zionist racism and imperialism....
... As an egalitarian argument we should say loud and clear that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state.
Only a single egalitarian and non sectrarian state over all the whole of historic
Palestine will achieve justice and peace.
http://www.counterpunch.org/bendor11202007.html
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antibrainwasher1 year, 1 month ago
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One of the reasons I felt a kinship for Obama is his grandparents from Kansas, where I unfortunately grew up. I know those grandparents in a general sense, white middle class like my mother and father. My father was a racist republican small town Bob Dole republican idiot, my mother was a liberal straight ticket dem depression era WWII girl, nonracist. Methodist. ect.... My brother, sister and I left Kansas as soon as was possible, and recently I got my mother out of there, freaking hickarse red state.
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I think calling Obama black is nothing but a throw back to the one drop of black blood southern racist crap. My kids are also mixed race asian/white. They are beautiful, and my daughter is president of her all white republican sorority, the queen bee of the hive, an arsekicking liberal dem, and she does occasionally have to kick some repugnicon sorority arse when they start puking up faux noise talking points like socialism, like any of those dipnuts beauches ever lived outside Ohio or would understand socialism if it bit them on their girly republican arses.-
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chevydog1 year, 1 month ago
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It's your call, but I wouldn't be so quick to pull the trigger. My parents were sort of low level racists to hear them talk. so we wondered how they would accept Korean grandchildren. No problems at all it turned out. It's easy to voice opinions about people in general that you don't know. Not always quite as easy when one talks about specific people.
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Sometimes people are handicapped by circumstances. Where I was from in central PA, there weren't many blacks. In fact, I never even met one until I was in college; then I knew two. It can be hard to interact normally with a person when the only way you've ever seen someone like him is throwing rocks through windows on TV.
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antibrainwasher1 year, 1 month ago
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What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say.
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The region’s absence from Mr. Obama’s winning formula means it “is becoming distinctly less important,” said Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. “The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics.”-
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antibrainwasher1 year, 1 month ago
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One reason for that is that the South is no longer a solid voting bloc. Along the Atlantic Coast, parts of the “suburban South,” notably Virginia and North Carolina, made history last week in breaking from their Confederate past and supporting Mr. Obama. Those states have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years, pointing them in a different political direction than states farther west, like Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and Appalachian sections of Kentucky and Tennessee.
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Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally. By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say.
That could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues. And the Southernization of American politics — which reached its apogee in the 1990s when many Congressional leaders and President Bill Clinton were from the South — appears to have ended
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antibrainwasher1 year, 1 month ago
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The Republicans, meanwhile, have “become a Southernized party,” said Mr. Schaller, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “They have completely marginalized themselves to a mostly regional party,” he said, pointing out that nearly half of the current Republican House delegation is now Southern.
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antibrainwasher1 year, 1 month ago
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Several Southern states, including Arkansas, Louisiana and Tennessee, have voted for the winner in presidential elections for decades. No more. And Mr. Obama’s race appears to have been the critical deciding factor in pushing ever greater numbers of white Southerners away from the Democrats.
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Here in Alabama, where Mr. McCain won 60.4 percent of the vote in his best Southern showing, he had the support of nearly 9 in 10 whites, according to exit polls, a figure comparable to other Southern states. Alabama analysts pointed to the persistence of traditional white Southern attitudes on race as the deciding factor in Mr. McCain’s strong margin. Mr. Obama won in Jefferson County, which includes the city of Birmingham, and in the Black Belt, but he made few inroads elsewhere.
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antibrainwasher1 year, 1 month ago
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“Alabama, unfortunately, continues to remain shackled to the bonds of yesterday.”
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David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, pointed out that the 18 percent share of whites that voted for Senator John Kerry in 2004 was almost cut in half for Mr. Obama.
“There’s no other explanation than race,” he said.-
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hyperbola1 year, 1 month ago
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Unfortunately, the "crackpot christianity" of the south has been exported to much of the rest of the country and the "south" will continue in this guise for some time yet.
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Crackpot Christianity and America's Current Moral Degeneration
Although he might not agree with my use of the term "Crackpot Christians," Kevin Phillips is certainly correct when he claims that "the radical side of U.S. religion has embraced cultural antimodernism, war hawkishness, Armageddon prophecy, and in the case of conservative fundamentalists, a demand for government by literal biblical interpretation." [American Theocracy, p. 100]
These Crackpot Christians are largely responsible for placing one of their own, George W. Bush, in the White House. Their astounding ignorance, unquestioning faith, war hawkishness, and fascination with the End of Time subsequently rendered them gullible to the Bush administration's lies and exaggerations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (especially the apocalyptic "mushroom clouds") and ties to al Qaeda. Thus, they cannot escape responsibility for supporting an illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq.
Judging by recent polls, Crackpot Christians continue to provide the residual support that prevents the total collapse of the worst presidency in American history. Their insouciance toward the ever worsening daily horrors in Iraq - so vividly reported by Jeffrey Gettleman in the August 2006 issue of GQ -- is daily testimony to their moral degeneracy. And, by their refusal to repent and improve, Crackpot Christians become responsible for the precipitous collapse of U.S. moral authority now occurring around the world.....
... Crackpot Christians have a long history of moral degeneracy. Simply look back to America's Civil War and you'll find southern clergymen - clergymen! -- citing verses from the Bible (e.g., Exodus 20-21, Matthew 10:14 and Ephesians 6:5-6) to justify slavery. According to Martin E. Marty (perhaps, our foremost authority on religion in America), "The South especially cherished the most literal readings [of the Bible], because on these terms it could find biblical passages in support of slavery." [Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America, pp. 302-303] ...
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antibrainwasher1 year, 1 month ago
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There is some hicktown in Ireland (of course) where they have traced Obamas mother, so now they have a song they sing at the pub where they are now trying to attract tourists, ...
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O'Reily, O'hara ect ect, but nobodies as Irish as O'bama.
Freaking beer swilling Irish.-
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CHAM1 year, 1 month ago
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Obama is an American just as some of my relatives are American, whether their ancestry languished in the Japanese Internment camps, the Palestinian Internment camps, the camps of oppressors every where for that matter.
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America is a Nation of Mutts. No more, no less. Mutts are American -
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RedstateLib1 year, 1 month ago
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I love it, liberals touting their none bigotry by using bigoted statements. Lumping everyone who did not support Obama into a group of racist, redneck, southerners ignorant. Some of you are nothing more than bigots yourselves you just think it's PC to hate and "PREJUDGE" the people you choose. Did it ever occur to any of you that there are many different people may not have supported Obama. Yes for some people it was race. For others it was they are pro-life and only vote pro-life candidates. Some people will only vote Republican no matter who is on either ticket.( and you know darned well some of you would only vote Democrat no matter who is on a Republican ticket) some people don't support government getting into healthcare, some don't like his tax policy, some are afraid that some of his proposals will further bankrupt the treasury, some think he will pull us out of Iraq to fast and cause the region to erupt.. So to sum it up it makes you no better than those racist when you attribute thoughts and motivations onto a large group of people who you have never met just to try and put them into a slot that fits your world view. Some of you need to leave the echo chamber and get out into the world you claim to know everything about, meet some of the people who you claim to know so well and then take a long look in the mirror at the bigot that lives inside you.
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BB641 year, 1 month ago
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I'm the president of a local Lutheran church. Over 1/2 our congregation are African American. Most of those are very unhappy with Mr. Obama and his claims of being African American. They've said a number of times, he's Kenyan American not African American. He may be of mixed races but he knows where his father and mother came from. Most African Americans are descendants of slaves. They were ripped from their homes, sold and shipped to the Americas. A terrible thing to be sure. No real heritage and no way really to track down your family left in your home country. Mr. Obama has very little in common with them.
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They may not have liked Mr.Obama but this did vote for him because of skin color. We've come so far as a people yet skin color seems to matter once again. How sad.-
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prater56001 year, 1 month ago
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African American describes an American with roots in Africa. Since Kenya is a country in Africa, that makes Obama Africa American. The blacks in your church are confused.
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The bigotry in this country is based on skin color, not where you're from. I haven't heard of any white African Americans experiencing discrimination.
That is why blacks can relate to Obama. Because of his skin color, he can relate to what we go through.
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Natureboy1 year, 1 month ago
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Obama is "black" based on the slave-era and apartheid "one drop rule," that one drop of black blood makes a person black.
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The "is Obama black, white or mixed" argument has meaning ONLY within the context of racism. Race is a social construct without a corresponding biological correlate. Anyone whose forefathers lived in a climate similar to sub-saharan Africa's will be more likely to display a dark skin, kinky hair, flat nose - these are simply the responses of the human genome to those specific environmental conditions. Similarly, anyone whose ancestors lived for generations in a place where malaria is widespread will be more prone to sickle cell. Again, it's not a "racial characteristic," just the human genome's adaptation to specific environmental conditions. Genetic research has pretty much debunked the notion of race as a biological reality.
But even in the absence of race, systems of racial classification persist. Notably, they persist in societies where racial classification serves to foster discrimination and to maintain rigid class barriers.
So, the fact that Obama is PERCEIVED as black, and yet was elected president in this country is significant. A protracted discussion of whether he is black, white, or of mixed race is objectively meaningless.
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