Finding Fault with Obama's Blackness
During the campaign season, did you happen to notice how some people seemed disturbed by how Barack Obama kept referring to himself as black? I know I did. Such talk was popping up all over the place, especially in blogs and personal websites. It often came across as, "How dare he! Why does he keep saying he's black when he's not!? He's only half!" This was said as if being "half" was equivalent to not being black at all or, worse yet, better than being plain 'ol black. I don't know about you, but I am quickly growing tired of this type of sentiment and here's why:
Virtually all black Americans, especially those of us who come from multiple generations of American-born blacks, are of mixed ancestry. Oftentimes, our African ancestry is mixed with white or Native American/Indian, or a combination of both. Therefore, going by pure DNA, we are all mixed. And just because some of us are born to two "black" parents doesn't mean that those born to one are any more mixed than the other. In fact, some blacks with two black parents have "mixed" percentages that could rival even those with one black/one white parent.
Race mixing did not stop when slavery ended, just as it did not begin with the hippie/one love/anti-establishment movement of the 60s and 70s. It has been happening since the first African landed on American shores and has continued up through today!
It seems as if some in the black community, excuse my political incorrectness - biracial community, and others want to return to the days of identifying one another as mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, and so on. Funny thing. When such terms were in fashion, i.e. when identifying one another by the percentage of our racial makeup was the policy of the day, so was the practice of assigning "value" based on that percentage by greater American society, with persons with the least amount of black rising to the top of the list. That is a period in history that I neither wish to go back to nor repeat in modern times.
The latest "Barack Obama is not black" nonsense is an article by Marie Arana, published in the Washington Post Sunday. Luckily, I didn't have to delve into its craziness because Jack & Jill Politics did the job quite nicely. Check out the interesting dialogue on the topic here.
As an African-American woman who is often mistaken for biracial (thanks to that multi-generational race-mixing thing discussed above), let me just say this:
I am BLACK, proud to be BLACK and proud to identify as BLACK!
