zsana
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 Posted: Sun 29 Jun 2008 21:24 Post subject: Interviews and Articles by Diversity Inc's Yoji Cole |
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Jeff Mendes, a biracial man with an African-American mother and a Jewish/Polish father, shares his personal story with DiversityInc Los Angeles Bureau Chief Yoji Cole.
http://www.diversityinc.com/public/3450.cfm
More from Yoji Cole...
Mixed Rants: 8 Things NEVER to Say to a Mixed-Race Colleague
http://www.louiegong.typepad.com/rants/8_things.html
Half-Black, Half-White: Obama's and My Identity
By Yoji Cole. Date Posted: January 15, 2008 in DiversityInc.com
http://multiculturalcenter.osu.edu/article.asp?id=141§ion=2
| Quote: | It seems that daily media reports remind voters that Barack Obama could be the country's first Black-American president. Rarely, if ever, is it mentioned that Obama could be the country's first biracial president.
Obama's candidacy has forced the country to face its stereotypes of Black Americans in general and Black-American men in particular. When Obama declared his intent to run for president, Sen. Joe Biden used the words "articulate" and "clean" to describe him, which some thought implied that Obama was a Black enigma, igniting a firestorm of controversy.
Now a National Public Radio (NPR) report notes that in addition to everyone forgetting that Obama is half-white, it appears the candidate has, too. Obama referred to himself at an MTV stop as an African American as opposed to biracial, reported NPR.
Who Obama is--the offspring of a white mother from Kansas and a Black father from Kenya--provides the public an opportunity to learn what it means to be mixed in America. It's a romantic notion that many who are not mixed share. The mixed person is thought to have a supernatural ability to transcend race and its accompanying stereotypes, to truly have the freedom to pick their identity, their mate, their social network of friends, church, music, art, food, without having to consciously or subconsciously consider their race.
But the truth, according to what I've experienced living as a biracial person, is that ours is a country in which group identity equals power. People have an incessant need to know who you are, your gender, your sexual orientation, your religion, where you stand on the issues, so they can identify the groups to which you belong and, therefore, identify who you are.
Our conversations are littered with attempts to codify people. For example, I regularly hear "Black people do this," or "white people do that," or "that's Black" or "that's white."
That effort is about power, and the larger the group, the greater its power, both politically and socially, because the nation is run on consumer buying power. Consider that with the increasing wealth of Latino and Black Americans also comes the power to influence a company that wants to sell its products and services to consumers. Consider that most television networks air shows that feature more white people than Latinos, Blacks, Asian Americans or Native Americans because there are more white Americans than others. Consider that political polls and surveys seek to learn what voters want according to their racial and gender groupings as opposed to people's individual needs.
Biracial or multiracial Americans live in a country where being identified as belonging to a group is important and belonging to the right group is most important. I wrote about that dynamic in DiversityInc magazine's February 2005 issue in the article "Who Is An African American?" The article detailed the birth of "whiteness" as an identity opposite to that of Blackness when colonial laws identified Africans as slaves and Europeans as indentured servants and gave whites new rights and opportunities, including jobs as overseers to police Blacks. Out of those laws was born the "one-drop rule" which the Supreme Court in 1896 upheld with its ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. That case defined whiteness as having no link to African blood.
My white father's words to me when I was 6 years old were "Son, be proud of your blackness because you will always be seen in this country as a black man." They came after I complained that combing my Afro pulled my head and hurt, and I had said I wished I had his straight hair.
After he said those words, I identified more with being black than white. Also, over the years, people with whom I've come into contact first identified my curly hair and copper skin tone as black traits. They might later ask if I'm "mixed," but they never say I'm white.
But what did it mean to be a Black American? My father didn't have firsthand knowledge, and my mother, while being Black, is from the Caribbean and, therefore, was not reared in America. So my Black-American identity was developed by people's reaction to me. At times, those reactions involved being called the N-word, or an expectation that I should be able to jump high, or that within me I housed a well of rhythm. For me, a writer, that also meant that I should know the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and other notable Black leaders, along with the writings of James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, to name a few Black-American authors.
I assume Obama's experience, while not identical, was similar. Obama was raised primarily by his mother and her parents. Essentially he was raised in a "white" home. But outside his home, Obama's curly hair, skin color and facial features would identify him as Black.
"Today's black identity has been nearly a lifelong preoccupation for Obama," wrote the author Shelby Steele, who is also half-white and half-Black, in TIME magazine. "Americans want to believe that there are people on whom race sits very lightly, people whose very hybridism suggests the possibility of transcending race … But [Obama's] books show a man nothing less than driven by a determination to be black."
Steele recounts Obama's choice to work as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago, known for its Black community. He also admits to his own effort to develop a stronger connection to Black America by working in Great Society programs in East St. Louis, Illinois' Black communities.
"These were also very likely quests for racial authenticity--for a resolution of that peculiar alienation that trails mixed-race people, that absence of a simple solidarity," wrote Steele in TIME.
For people who are the offspring of one black parent, the one-drop rule forced them to identify with Black people, for better or for worse. While the Supreme Court struck down the one-drop rule in 1967 with its ruling in Loving v. Virginia, effectively eradicating anti-miscegenation laws, social practices have been slower to change.
So if Obama identifies as Black before being biracial, he does so probably because that is how America has reacted to him. That does not mean he ignores the other parts that make him who he is just because others might. "I'm very sensitive to making sure that everybody feels a part of America, and that's one of the things that I think I can bring to this presidency. The day that I'm inaugurated, the country will look at itself differently," said Obama to an MTV audience, reported NPR. |
Last edited by zsana on Sun 29 Jun 2008 21:32; edited 1 time in total |
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