Monday, October 8, 2012

It Is Our Choices That Show What We Truly Are


President Obama is the first African American President of the Unites States. This fact is ubiquitous, yet it is sometimes easy to forget that the President can also be labeled as multiracial. Personally I am half-Indian, but I do not consider myself Asian. Though I enjoy many of the customs of my father’s home country, I do not embrace most Indian culture as my own. I will argue that the President, however, takes a different route and fully embraces the black side of himself. His choice makes me wonder if I would be treated differently if I appeared, like many other half-Indians, to be one hundred percent Indian. How would the President be treated differently if he looked completely white and did not identify at all with the African American population? How would these elections play out differently if the President was a white man who happened to be half-black rather than a black president who happened to be half-white?

In Remembering Jim Crow, Kenneth Young speaks of a white man who speaks with an African American gentleman who appears completely white and then fails to recognize the different race of the second man. When the white male learns that the other man is actually “black” his immediate response is claiming that he needs to wash his hands, because it is against the custom of the country for a white man to shake hands with a black man. This incident is a powerful reminder of the internalization of racial thoughts and the dominance these views have over common sense. The African American man had the same personality, demeanor, and skin color both before and after the white man knew his race, but all that mattered to the white man was that the second man was labeled as African American. This portrayal of instant racial profiling seems to argue that if the President had white skin and people knew he was half-African, they would still classify him as “black.”

Though I do not wish to deny the President’s African American heritage, I believe it is important to remember that President Obama is not simply unique in the Presidential line-up for being the first black president, but he is also unique in that he is the first truly multiracial president. He comprises of both white and black genetics and black and white culture.

If President Obama is to be labeled as African American and not white, it should not be because of the color of his skin, but because he has embraced the heritage and culture of the African American community. Visual interpretation as means of cultural identification is not a sufficient way to classify an individual. President Obama is considered an African American president because he has assumed that facet of himself as the dominant side. At birth, Barack Obama is an African American in the most literal, rather than cultural, sense; he has a father from Kenya, while his mother is a young white woman from Kansas. Despite being raised by a white mother, without his black father shaping his daily life, the President chose to identify with the African American cultural group. He chose to join a predominantly black church and assimilate into the African American church tradition. He chose a career as a civil rights lawyer, which includes discrimination law, over all other types of law. He chose to volunteer in a predominately black community and dedicate his efforts first and foremost to helping that segment of the population. In “Fear of a Black President,” Ta-Nehisi Coates claims, “Obama is not simply America’s first black president—he is the first president who could credibly teach a black-studies class.”

Yet the interesting fact is that the President does not have direct ties to ancestors who were African American slaves suffering under the rule of white men*. His skin color, however, caused the majority of citizens to place him in this class of people automatically. Rather than ignoring this classification, the President takes this in stride and begins advocating for African Americans. The President clearly believes race to be an issue worth recognizing or else the United States would have seen his life take a very different path. He may not have chosen to be initially and automatically identified as African American, but he definitely chose to embrace and take pride in this characterization.

If you choose to re-elect President Obama because of racial reasons, which I am not encouraging or discouraging, it should be because he has embraced both the black and white inside himself and know internally how it feels to be more than one race, not because he has more melanin than the average individual. Do you believe the President is known as the first African American president because of his skin color or because of his cultural identification? How would the last and this coming election be different if the President looked a hundred percent white but was still fundamentally half-African?


*However, the President may have ties to one of the first documented slaves entering the colonies from his mother’s side.
See article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/us/obamas-mother-had-african-forebear-study-suggests.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Sources: 

2 comments:

  1. I believe President Obama is viewed as black primarily because of the color of his skin. The world is very visual; clearly, President Obama would have been visually identified as a minority growing up. It's human nature to gravitate toward sameness, it's comfortable. Though his ancestors may have not shared the same historical development as most African-Americans(in the categorical and not literal sense)his experiences shaped him into an American that can relate to the situations that people of visible color in his generation have experienced.

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  2. This does bring up an interesting question of what constitutes blackness. It seems that Obama's percentage of black genetics holds more weight that of his white genetics. Why is this the case? It also makes me wonder about the identity of racially-mixed individuals. It seems that they are required to choose one racial identity. Maybe that pervasive need for racial categorization is more prevalent today than we realize. What makes a racially-mixed person more of one race than another? How does the African American experience inform this choice?

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