Obama can’t be white?
Few would question the fact that Barack Hussein Obama is America’s first Black President. In fact he’s rightfully celebrated as the first Black American President of the United States. Now, very famously he was subjected to a racist Birther conspiracy propagated by Donald Trump and others but his mixed race “Blackness” was not critically questioned. We’ll get back to Obama in a moment.
As we move through this world our racial identity is front and center for everyone to make inferences, or perhaps more accurately, assumptions about who we are. In different blocks of time these assumption could and did have significant impacts on our status as human beings. Many of the stains from the not so distant past that dot the fabric of American and European societies can still be seen and felt today. In America, being white and whiteness is associated with purity and thus anyone who is even one drop African cannot be considered white. This of course was not just an idea but codified in law in the United States. In the late 19th century through the early 20th century there were “one drop” laws that varied by state. In some states, like Virginia, if you had one black ancestor (black blood) then you were to be considered black, regardless of proportion. Of course, being black in the eyes of the law was not an advantage and was most often made to be punitive.
Back to Obama and the Pew research center
If a person with one white parent and one black parent is to be thought of by race, in what race group do you place them? In the case of Obama, what do you think a Pew opinion poll completed in 2009 revealed about the Race Obama would be considered to be a part of? I'll tell you, as Paul Taylor described in 2014 in an article titled 1"The Next America".
The poll conducted by the Pew research center showed only 27% of Americans thought of Obama as black and the rest considered Obama mixed race.
What's telling about this Pew poll is not the 27% but the fact that the poll seemingly left out an option for poll takers to select White. It is such a given that a mixed man or a black man could never be considered a white man in America that an organization like PEW research center can completely leave it out of the equation. An equation, that for Obama, and other biracial Americans like me, include one fully white parent. Here is a graphic from Taylor's article that shows the PEW results without White as a possible option.
This brings me to the point and why this is problematic.
In the minds of many Americans an idea that still permeates social groups and institutions is one of a false purity. If you are black or have a drop of black ancestry you have been marked or tainted and as such you are no longer pure white. This reveals itself in a downgrade of class or status. The white supremacy that was once codified in American law now gets past down in the community consciousness and subconscious of us all.
If you are mixed you are allowed to be considered black and allowed to be considered mixed or biracial. But if you are mixed you are NOT allowed to be considered white under any meaningful context or circumstance.
Your whiteness, as it's viewed, has been tainted by the drop of black blood and ancestry in your family line. Not unlike President Obama my mother is white and my father is black. I am particularly light in complexion and not once in my life have I felt that I would be considered white. I have been asked the horribly phrased question "What are you" as if I'm a sub-species of human. Although mixed, biracial or black have all been answers I’ve given, never have I been inclined to respond with “White”. Why, because White would not be an accepted answer by the person or institution asking that question. I dare to say every black and brown person, every BIPOC, knows what it’s like to navigate this world as a non-white. To know that your country and fellow countrymen and woman have shown over the generations that they do not see you as an equal. Many Exceptions of course, yet even today we are reminded of our “place”, our “status”, our “class”, our supposed “less than-ness”.
So you want to be White?
That’s not quite what I’m driving at here. The idea is that even today being black or having any black ancestry in and of itself can impact how you “get” to live in this space. And that it is so much a part of who we are that a man with a full white mother can’t be properly considered White the way he can be considered Black. That the closest he is allowed to come to white is “Mixed Race” formally by law and now by societal norms. And furthermore, that an institution or organization of professional research and polling like PEW, can without impunity completely and utterly leave out even the option to be considered white. This is not the cause of discourse between races today but a clear symptom of systemic racism and supremacy overtones that refuse to remove the metaphorical shackles from our very real daily lives. White is apparently not an option for us, and that’s problematic.
I ask of the PEW research center these questions today. In the poll described above where you ask Americans if they think of Obama as more Black or of Mixed Race. Why did you choose to omit the possibility to select White along with Black and mixed as Obama’s possible race?
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Pew poll 2009 presented by Paul Taylor in his article "Next America"
https://www.pewresearch.org/next-america/#Changing-Perception-of-Mixed-Race
📸 original digital drawing credit: J.Quinten “Obama Tan Suit Scandal”