The Skin Game: Do White Voters LIke Barack Obama Because 'He's Not Really Black'?

RACE AND POLITICS

By Don Terry
Columnist
The Chicago Tribune

My father was ahead of his time. He theorized that if enough people had racially mixed children, racism would eventually disappear.

He did his part: He had six biracial children. I was his third little bridge builder. But what I learned most from my father was to be stingy with my dreams and cautious with my hopes about race. As his generation of African-Americans waited for peace to break out, there were bitter disappointments and broken promises around every corner. I've had my share as well.

That's why after 47 years, most of them spent in Chicago, a city that has struggled mightily with segregation and racial strife, it is hard for me to trust my own eyes even as I stare obvious progress in the face. My vision, I'm afraid, has been clouded by history and memories of the racial conflicts during the days of Mayor Harold Washington, a loyal Democrat betrayed by his own party. I'm just not used to seeing whites showering so much money, votes and adulation on a black politician.

But Barack Obama, who is all but certain to be the next U.S. senator from Illinois, is no ordinary politician. He's a Rorschach test. What you see is what you want to see.

Obama, the sandy-colored, half-white, half-black, Hawaii-born, Harvard-trained, civil rights lawyer with the magnetic smile, "is the literal embodiment of our cultural hybridity," says Salim Muwakkil, a senior editor at In These Times magazine. "He's mastered the cultural jargon of the Ivy League. That makes him less threatening, more soothing to white sensibilities. One of Barack's great strengths is his complexity."

Indeed, everybody seems to be able to break off a piece of the 43-year-old state senator from Hyde Park and claim it as his or her own. That kind of popularity can be a blessing and a curse. The biracial man's burden.

"To black people he's black. To some whites, they don't see him as a black man. They see him almost as one of them," says Bamani Obadele, chairman of the African American Political Organization and a deputy director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. "Barack Obama is whatever you want him to be."

Or as Paul Green, a professor of political science at Roosevelt University, puts it, "Obama has the resume and the appeal to transcend race."

I experienced this Barack-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder phenomenon for the first time last spring after Obama won the Democratic primary election with a convincing 53 percent of the vote. Obama--or his Republican rival, Alan Keyes, if he stages a major upset--will be only the fifth African-American to serve in the Senate-the third since Reconstruction.

At the time, I was on assignment and speeding to a federal prison camp in a green Mercedes. The color of money. The white woman behind the wheel made sure I knew the car was 10 years old. She didn't have to be defensive with me. I know you can't judge a progressive by the car she drives. Besides, I never bite the hand that gives me a lift.

"I love Barack," said the woman, a middle-aged filmmaker, as we zipped past a campaign-style yard sign shoved into the dirt on the edge of a cornfield. The sign proclaimed, "Guns Save Lives."

"He's smart. He's handsome. He's charismatic," she continued. "He has the potential to be our first minority president."

"I hear what you're saying," I said. "But tell me. Why don't you say he has the potential to be our first black president?"

She seemed taken aback by my question and took a few moments to answer. "I guess it's because I don't think of him as black," she said.

Now it was my turn to be taken aback. I wasn't sure if what she said was good or bad. It sounded forward-thinking, I suppose, one step closer to the one-race, one-world ideal my parents marched for, and, in my mother's case, went to jail for, when I was a kid. But it also sounded a lot like a new-old way of looking straight at a black person and not seeing him.

Her explanation angered me. I kept it to myself, though. I didn't want to get kicked out of the car. I did not believe she was colorblind. She just couldn't see black, not when it came wrapped in such a pretty package.

But the incident also churned up my ambivalent feelings about race and sent me on a personal quest to explore the nexus of politics and identity, assimilation and integration.

There was no lack of opinion out there. Despite the talk about his transcendence of race, Obama's mixed heritage has generated plenty of comment in newspaper stories and magazine articles, in Internet chat rooms and in the halls of academia.

He's a "post-racial" politician, according to one East Coast writer. The New Republic said he's "an African-American candidate who was not stereotypically African-American."

When I look at Obama, I see a black man much like myself. We both grew up on our own sort of island. Obama was born and raised in Hawaii. I spent most of my life in Hyde Park.

We both come from racially mixed families. My two older brothers, David and Robert, are white. Technically, they're my half brothers. We have the same white mother, different fathers. Their old man was thin and white. Mine was tall and black. What the two dads had in common was a stormy love for our mother.

Growing up, my older brother was like a father to me. And if I sometimes dress like a white suburban Republican, blame him. He gives me a Brooks Brothers shirt every Christmas.

Obama's mother was from Kansas. Mine grew up near the tiny village of Greenwood, Ill., which is not far from the once-small town of Woodstock, where "Groundhog Day" was filmed.

Obama's father was from Kenya and, as a young man, came to "this magical land" of America to study, as the son so eloquently put it in his star-turn of a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. My father was born in Kentucky, the grandson of slaves.

Our parents were rebels. When I was born in 1957 and Obama four years later in 1961, interracial marriages were illegal in a lot of the country.

Even 20 years ago, there would be little question that men of mixed race such as Obama and me--men with sandy skin and woolly hair--would be considered black, no matter how much white blood or how little black blood we had running through us.

It's known as the one-drop rule: One drop of black blood made you black. It was a convenient way to keep the mixed offspring of slave masters in bondage. After slavery, it was a handy tool to keep people down. One drop was the way of the land for more than 200 years.

With Obama and other mixed-raced celebrities such as Tiger Woods, Vin Diesel and Halle Berry leading the way, the idea of one drop has been fading fast. "We're moving into a period of time when the country is getting much more diverse," Obama told me. "The use of simple racial labels is going to be more difficult to apply."

When I was a child, I called myself "mixed." You could get away with that in Hyde Park. In the 1960s the neighborhood was flush with biracial kids like me: half-black and half-white, half-Jewish and half-Japanese, half this and half that.

But as I got older and began venturing beyond the safety of the neighborhood's boundaries, the world saw me as a black boy and treated me as such. When I was 8 and my family was visiting friends in Winnetka, where Obama yard signs are easy to find these days, a white boy about my age chanted "nigger" at me over and over. My pacifist mother threw a pink plastic cup at him. He scurried down the street calling for his mommy.

Afterwards, my mother made sure I knew that "black was beautiful" and Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest man in the world; that my father was brave and Paul Robeson was an American hero with the singing voice of God. Obama told me his mother did the same for him. Harry Belafonte, she said, was the most handsome man alive and Obama's father the most intelligent.

Black sounded great. Blackness wasn't the problem. Racism was, and is.

Full story

Comments

[The truth is]

Not saying I condone it, but Obama will start a civil war. He's a black supremecist and the first time he signs anything hinting of racial favortism race war will be the result. Thats the facts jack.

[Joseph]

sort of*

sorry

[Joseph]

Your article is well meaning, but racism will always exist. If the whole country were mixed the "lighter" would hate the "darker" and vis versus. For the record, racism is not that, its practical. There is a reason that a black man is more than 90 times more likely to rape a white woman that vis versus. Does any of this have to do with poverty? I know if I were poor, (I am sort) raping a woman would not make it any better. I think excuses like that are just bs as is the whole "racism" discussion.

[Nubianem]

IF YOU LOOK BLACK/NEGRO, YOU ARE BLACK NEGRO

Personally, I am fed up with the so-called 'biracial' and 'multiracial' CONSPIRACY BEING HATCHED BY THE WHITE NATIONALISTS, RACISTS AND PSEUDO-CONSERVATIVES.

Blackness in America and the world is supported by genetic and social factors. ANYONE WHO LOOKS BLACK, HAS BLACK FEATURES AND BLACK GENES IS BLACK, REGARDLESS OF BEING HALF OR ONE QUARTER BLACK.

Here in America and Latin America, it is a fact that a person who looks Black/Negroid IS BLACK. The same criteria also is applied in Latin America, India, Melanesia, Europe, Asia, Australia and Southern China.

WHY? It is because the Black race is the PARENT RACE ON PLANET EARTH. Everone has Black genes. In fact Scientific American showed that European 'whites' have 75 percent African genes while Asians have 60 percent African genes. Africans/Negroes have 5 percent Europeans genes.

How can that be one will ask, particularly when you have half white and half Black unions. Well, that is so because 'whites' are composed of original Negro Black genes, SO WHEN YOU MIX A BLACK AND WHITE, YOU GET A PERSON WITH PREDOMINANTLY BLACK/NEGRO GENES EVEN IF THE LOOK MIXED.

Secondly the 'construct' of race cannot be hidden or ran away from. The construct is if you have Black blood or look Black you are Black.

It is rather hypocritical to use the term 'Latino' and 'American' Indian to classify two groups of people composed of all types of races as a RACE, yet, Blacks in hte US who are 95 percent homogeneous and whose features are still strongly African Negroid will be called 'multiracial' simply because of some violator during the slave trade who violated a Black female ancestor.

This attempt to divide and weaken the Black population was in play since the days of Willie Lynch, whose ignorance and scheme to mentally destroy Blacks made the mistake of thinking that 'breeding' pure African Blacks MANY WHO CAME FROM WARRIOR STOCK AND WERE STRONG, WELL BUILT, PROUD AND EDUCATED with disease-infested surf populations of Europe would create a 'mule' suitable for enslavement (see "Willie Lynch Letter," http://community.webtv.net/nubianem )

This legacy of rape, violation and experimentation for slavery is what 'multiracial' and 'biracial' offspring was about during slavery. TODAY, IT IS STILL PART OF THE SYSTEM OF SUPREMACY THAT CANNOT STOP PEOPLE BLACKS FROM MOVING FORWARD AND HAVE FOUND OUT THAT IF THEY CREATE A 'BUFFER' RACE TO INFILTRATE THE BLACK RACE...ONE THAT IS LOYAL TO WHITES AND DENYS THEIR BLACK SIDE..THAT GROUP CAN BE USED IN DESTROYING BLACKS.

This is what the Arabs have been doing in Sudan, where they were blatent in saying that THEY WANTED TO 'LIGHTEN UP' THE PRUE BLACK RACE OF DAFUR WITH 'MIXED' ARAB CHILDREN.

Fortunately, there is an African custom that says, children by a raptist, foreign occupier, coloniaist, foreign race BELONGS TO THE BLACK NATIVE SIDE WHICH IS USUALLY THE MOTHERS AND VICTIMS, AND NOT THE VIOLATOR.

In the case of white woman/Black man the child is still BLACK/NEGRO based on the social and genetic factors.

IT IS ONLY CULTURAL INDOCTRINATION AND BRAINWASHING THAT TURNS A GENETICALLY AND PHYSICALLY BLACK/NEGRO CHILD TO A 'MULTIRACIAL' SELLOUT AND TRAITOR WORKING FOR THE PERPETUATION OF RACISM AND SUPREMACY.

This idea of calling 'Black, yellow, red, white' people 'Latino," and stealing Black music, religion, language, culture and calling it 'Latino" or forcing the 'mulattoization' of Blacks IS AS EVIL AS TRYING TO MIX UP THE DISTINCT BLACK AMERICAN PEOPLE AND CALLING THEM 'MULTIRACIAL.

HOW COMES THE 'AMERICAN INDIANS' MANY WHO ARE ABOUT 90 PERCENT CAUCASIAN WHITE ARE CALLED 'AMERICAN INDIAN,' WHEN THE TERM 'INDIAN' CAME FROM THE NAME OF THE BLACK SON OF HAM, 'HIND' WHO WAS A BLACK AFRICAN?

HOW COMES THE AMERICAN 'INDIANS' WHO ARE 90 PERCENT CAUCASIAN WHITE AND WHO LOOK AS WHITE AS MANY WHITES ALLOWED TO CALL THEMSELVES 'AMERICAN INDIANS" (THE ANCESTORS OF THESE WHITES ARE THE SAME WHITE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR EXTERMINATION AND GENOCIDE AGAINST AMERICAN INDIANS)

How comes the aboriginal Black 'Indian' nations of the Americas such as the Washita, Guale, Yamasse, Black Calafians, Choco, Chuarras, Olmec and other Negroid people not called 'Indians' when they are just as aboriginal and indigenous to the Americas as the 'Mongoloid' American Indians?
Negroid/Black aboriginal peoples of the Americas
http://community.webtv.net/pabarton

Why? It is because in order to maintain division and to occupy the Americas, the Europeans had to make the "Ethiopians" and 'Black Moors," they found in the Americas invisible by turning them to 'slaves of our Lord," (see "A History of the African-Olmecs: Black Civilizatons of America from Prehistoric Times to the Present Era," published by www.AuthorHouse.com also see "A History of Racism and Terrorism, Rebellion and Overcoming," pub. by www.Xlibris.com
http://community.webtv.net/nubianem )

As for most Black Americans, those of us who know our history ARE COCERNED ABOUT THE PRESERVATION, PROGRESS AND INDEPENDENCE OF BLACK AMERICANS.

Then, people like the supremacists, blamers and negators will have nothing to insult and criticize Black people about....THEY WILL RETURN TO INSULTING THE IRISH, FRENCH AND GERMANS.

[Tommy A Russell]

There will always be Racism so get over it!! And if they think "Obama" is white so let them think that way as long as he's taking care of Business and helping the "People" not just black "People" it's all-good. Black people are abscessed with Race it's clouding our lives too much. We think that "Black Leaders" need to provide some type of special treatment for other "Blacks" that's why we hate Blacks like Colin Powell and Ms Rice and Armstrong Williams because their opinions are outside the main stream thinking of most Blacks. (They’re the Enemy) Where as a “White Democrat” can come into the black community and Promise the world to us, and we get all sheepish and turn our vote over to them, no questions asked.