Mixed Race Studies

‘I move back and forth between the racial divides’: President Obama opens up on his mixed-race background and says it helps him recognize that most Americans have good intentions

The Daily Mail
London, United Kingdom
2014-12-21

Francesca Chambers, Political Reporter

• ‘There’s no doubt that…I move back and forth between the racial divides,’ Obama told CNN host Candy Crowley. ‘I’ve got a lot of cultural influences’
• Obama’s discussion with Crowley, taped on Friday, took a step further reflections he shared with reporters earlier that day at his year-end presser
• The president argued ‘people are basically good and have good intentions’ and ‘the vast majority of people are just trying to do the right thing’
• ‘If critics want to suggest that America is inherently and irreducibly racist, then why bother even working on it?’ he told Crowley

President Barack Obama is crediting his racial make up and exposure at a young age to an array of demographic groups with his ability to see the good in people.

‘There’s no doubt that…I move back and forth between the racial divides,’ Obama told CNN host Candy Crowley during a one-on-one interview that aired this morning on the news network.

‘Not just black-white, but Asian and Latino and, you know, I’ve got a lot of cultural influences,’ he added. ‘I think what it does do for me is to recognize that most Americans have good intentions.’

As he writes about in detail in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama was born to a white woman from Kansas and black man from Kenya. The couple met while studying at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

The young couple separated after days after Barack Obama was born and formally divorced a few years later. Obama’s mother soon remarried and she and her son moved to her husband’s home country of Indonesia.

Four years later Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents and to finish his schooling. His mother and sister eventually relocated to Hawaii for several years, as well, before moving back to Indonesia again, but Obama remained in Hawaii with his mother’s parents.

After graduating high school Obama moved to the contiguous United States, where he has lived ever since with his wife Michelle, whom he met while in law school, and their two children, Sasha, and Malia.

Obama’s discussion with Crowley about his personal history, taped on Friday, took a step further the life reflections the first mixed-race president first shared with reporters at his year-end press conference earlier that day.

The president had argued that ‘people are basically good and have good intentions,’ even though ‘sometimes our institutions and our systems don’t work as well as they should…

Read the entire article here. Read the CNN transcript here.

The Whiteness Project: Facing Race In A Changing America

National Public Radio
All Things Considered
2014-12-21

Karen Grigsby Bates
Los Angeles Correspondent

Whitney Dow found participants in the Whiteness Project by putting out a call for interested white folks in Buffalo to talk about whiteness on tape.

The voices in the Whiteness Project vary by gender, age and income, but they all candidly express what it is like to be white in an increasingly diverse country.

“I don’t feel that personally I’ve benefited from being white. That’s because I grew up relatively poor,” a participant shared. “My father worked at a factory.” These are the kind of unfiltered comments that filmmaker Whitney Dow was hoping to hear when he started recording a group of white people, and hoped to turn their responses into provocative, interactive videos.

“I was essentially giving people permission to discuss this,” he says. “And I believe there’s a huge hunger in this country to engage this topic.”…

…”It is not typical for white people to think about their race,” says Catherine Orr, who teaches critical identity studies at Beloit College in Wisconsin. She says that many white people who don’t feel privileged struggle against the notion that race gives them an inherent advantage. “I think white folks are terribly invested in our own innocence,” she points out. “We don’t want to think about how what we have is related to what other people don’t have.”…

Listen to the story here. Download the story here.