"Obama isn't black."
[W]hen the handsome Obama doesn't look eastern (versus western) African, he looks like his white mother . . . . Obama isn't black.
"Black," in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. - Debra J. Dickerson, Salon, January 22, 2007
Dickerson argues that Obama is not black because he is not the descendant of African slaves. But I would argue that blackness -- or, more accurately, "blackness" -- is determined not by whether one is descended from slaves, but the degree to which one sees one's identity as determined by one's race. Clearly, the fact that Obama's father was African, not American, plays a role in his well-known lack of "blackness," as does the fact that his mother is white. And yet, I believe that none of this is determinative. - Gary Kamiya, Salon, January 23, 2007Games, must we? If Obama becomes president, the story will not be about how the descendants of West-African slaves put aside . . . whatever . . . to elect the son of a transitory Kenyan immigrant and a white person. I'm sure the majority of black people in this country have ancestors who were slaves taken from West Africa (the same is true of quite a few white people). Some, a minority among American blacks, have different ancestry. It seems pointless to dwell on things like this. Obama didn't have the ideal-typical formative experiences of a black person in the United States. Who cares? We ought to only take him as an individual, not as a defective representation of some ideal type. I personally don't think all those presidents and presidential candidates who were born with different names had ideal-typical upbringings by any stretch.
When Kamiya writes of "the degree to which one sees one's identity as determined by one's race," he begs the question. He assumes race is something fixed. If you know your race, you can let it determine your "identity", or not. But, indisputably, race is an entirely social construction. There is no empirical basis for the categories of race in this or any other society. They are socially created. This is not to say that these categories are not "facts" in a sense, or that we can ignore them. But we should never forget that they are social fictions.
Labels: 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, race
posted at 12:40 AM
1 Comments:
Excellent!
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