Obama’s Mixology |
The Root
2008-10-30
Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University
Give Obama credit for not trying to use his biracial background as an appeal to white working-class voters.
Mix’ology: noun. The art and science of mixings
In these final days of this presidential campaign, John McCain and his supporters have been trying desperately to raise doubts about Barack Obama’s identity. They have called him a terrorist sympathizer, a socialist, an unrepentant liberal. For weeks, their tagline has been “Who is Barack Obama?” The McCain campaign hopes that the question will resonate with the part of the electorate that Obama had putatively most alienated: the white, working class.
For different reasons, this same identity question has also had some traction with people of color, many of whom worry that Obama will usher in what Danzy Senna calls the “mulatto millennium,” especially if it implies that, as some of Obama’s supporters chanted earlier this year, “race doesn’t matter.”…
…But Obama has rejected post-racialism, certainly to the extent it meant identifying as “mixed” rather than “black.” His position was evident as early as 2005, when he told representatives from the MAVIN Foundation, one of the nation’s largest mixed-race advocacy organizations, who had clearly hoped he would be both an icon and legislative whip on their behalf: “I am always cautious about…persons of mixed race focusing so narrowly on their own unique experiences that they are detached from larger struggles, and I think it’s important to try to avoid that sense of exclusivity, and feeling that you’re special in some way.”
As his Indonesian-Caucasian sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, noted, Obama identifies as black not because he is conscripted by the one-drop rule, but because he actively chooses it. He belongs to the black community not only because, historically, mixed people have always belonged, and because black has never been pure; he belongs also, his sister suggests, because of personal commitment and responsibility. The issue may appear moot since race is part choice, part social ascription, and Obama could not simply opt out of the race even if he woke up some morning and chose to. But it remains important that he does not bill himself as “mixed” or “other” even when it might appear politically convenient or grant him cultural glam…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: John McCain, Michele Elam, The Root