Obama & Race

I think this Time Magazine article by Shelby Steele is the first article that really addresses this issue in a deep way, that I have read. For me it also shed alot of light into the whole issue of what it is like to grow up "mixed race" in this country, as well as racial politics in general

The Identity Card

"The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white mother and a black father. I heard this over and over again, never in a snide or gossipy way, always matter-of-factly. Apparently this was the way we Americans had to introduce Obama to each other. For some reason, knowledge of his racial pedigree had to precede even the mention of his politics--as if the pedigree inevitably explained the politics.

Of course, I am rather sensitive to all this because I, too, was born to a white mother and a black father, though I did not fully absorb this fact, which would have been so obvious to the outside world, until I was old enough to notice the world's fascination--if not obsession--with it. To this day it is all but impossible for me to actually stop and think of my parents as white and black or to think of myself, therefore, as half and half. This is the dumb mathematics of thinking by race--dumb because race is used here as a kind of bullying truth that pushes aside the actual human experience.

Racist societies make race into a hard fate. So people who are the progeny of two races become curiosities not because they are particularly interesting, but because they are so unexpected. This must be an old and tiresome vulnerability in Barack Obama's life (as it is in mine), and all the more so because he has chosen a public life. One senses that his first book, Dreams from My Father, was meant to diffuse some of this vulnerability. In it he does not merely own up to his interracial background as if to a past indiscretion; he candidly explores it. And his brave self-disclosure succeeds because we no longer live in an America that wants to make mixed-race people into pariahs. That was once done to keep firm the racial boundaries of American apartheid--the mulatto's tragic exile standing as a cautionary tale meant to keep people "with their own kind." But today's mixed-race person is "fresh," a word that trails Obama like a nickname."...read the rest online .

it's worth it, I think, not only in thinking about Obama, but also for all of us in thinking about race, racial politics, mixed race