A perplexing new chapter is unfolding in Barack Obama’s racial saga: Many people insist that “the first black president” is actually not black.
Debate over whether to call this son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan biracial, African-American, mixed-race, half-and-half, multiracial — or, in Obama’s own words, a “mutt” — has reached a crescendo since Obama’s election shattered assumptions about race.
Obama has said, “I identify as African-American — that’s how I’m treated, and that’s how I’m viewed. I’m proud of it.”
In other words, the world gave Obama no choice but to be black, and he was happy to oblige. But the world has changed since the young Obama found his place in it.
So what now for racial categories born of a time when those from far-off lands were property rather than people, or enemy instead of family?
“They’re falling apart,” said Marty Favor, a Dartmouth professor of African and African-American studies and author of the book “Authentic Blackness.”
“In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois said the question of the 20th century is the question of the color line, which is a simplistic black-white thing,” said Favor, who is biracial. “This is the moment in the 21st century when we’re stepping across that.”
Rebecca Walker, a 38-year-old writer with light brown skin who is of Russian, African, Irish, Scottish and American Indian descent, said she used to identify herself as “human,” which upset people of all backgrounds. So she went back to multiracial or biracial, “but only because there has yet to be a way of breaking through the need to racially identify and be identified by the culture at large.”
“Of course Obama is black. And he’s not black, too,” Walker said. “He’s white, and he’s not white, too. Obama is whatever people project onto him. . . . He’s a lot of things, and neither of them necessarily exclude the other.”
The entire issue balances precariously on the “one-drop” rule, which sprang from the slaveowner habit of dropping by the slave quarters and producing brown babies. One drop of black blood meant that person, and his or her descendants, could never be a full citizen.
Today, the spectrum of skin tones among African-Americans — even those with two black parents — is evidence of widespread white ancestry. Also, because blacks were often light enough to pass for white, unknown numbers of white Americans today have blacks in their family trees.
One book, “Black People and Their Place in World History,” by Dr. Leroy Vaughn, even claims that five past presidents — Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge — had black ancestors, which would make Obama the sixth of his kind.
Mix in a few centuries’ worth of Central, South and Native Americans, plus Asians, and untold millions of today’s U.S. citizens need a DNA test to decipher their true colors.
Six million people, or 2 percent of the population, now say they belong to more than one race, according to the most recent census figures. Another 19 million people, or 6 percent of the population, identify themselves as “some other race” than the five available choices.
In his memoir, Obama says he was deeply affected by reading that Malcolm X, the black nationalist turned humanist, once wished his white blood could be expunged.
“Traveling down the road to self-respect, my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction,” Obama wrote. “I was left to wonder what else I would be severing if I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border.”
