Mixed Race Studies

The talk of Obama as a presidential contender centers on this power to unite. But if Obama’s capacity for racial unification is to be credibly assessed, then the white heritage with which he is intimately familiar must be acknowledged as prominently as his black identity is. His black identity has been imposed without incident and paraded in public with fanfare. Yet, while Obama is known as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, he in fact is more probably the periodical’s first biracial president. He is celebrated as only the fifth African-American ever elected to the United States Senate, although he is more accurately among a tiny group of Americans of equal black and white heritage who have been elected to the United States Senate. It is as if the well researched and now-officially-recognized racial category for mixed Americans does not exist-or, if it does, never should be taken seriously as a category of its own, lest history be subject to significant revision informed by an enlightened embrace of ethnic distinctions that matter to every American’s identity.

Amos N. Jones, “Black Like Obama: What the Junior Illinois Senator’s Appearance on the National Scene Reveals About Race in America, and Where We Should Go from Here,” Thurgood Marshall Law Review, Volume 31 (2005): 84-85.

Black Like Obama: What the Junior Illinois Senator’s Appearance on the National Scene Reveals About Race in America, and Where We Should Go from Here

Thurgood Marshall Law Review
Volume 31 (2005)
pages 79-100

Amos N. Jones, Professor of Law
Campbell University, Raleigh, North Carolina

Given Americans’ warm bipartisan response to Senator Barack Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the realist is constrained to applaud with them. The fact that voters of all ethnicities enthusiastically back a man apparently black who, at first glance, is fairly critical of the status quo indicates that the country is more open-minded than it used to be. Once the applause has subsided, however, the realist is further constrained to take a hard look at the facts as opposed to the rhetoric accompanying Obama’s stardom. His globetrotting memoir and media appearances, while uplifting and entertaining, have proved unsatisfactory in delivering the obviously critical thinker’s original answer to the big question that has remained unaddressed since the euphoria of 2004, when numerous journalists proclaimed Obama the new black political hope: When, how, and why did Barack Obama become black?

This essay contextualizes Obama’s popular personal story within the messy legal and social framework created by centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation in America. It opens with a summary of Obama’s identity as presented in his autobiography republished in 2004 and proceeds through a specific review of racial classifications in American legal history, raising the question whether Obama should even be counted as a black man. After explaining the history of the “one-drop rule” given legal force by a rarely considered holding of Plessy v. Ferguson that remains good law even today, the essay criticizes the thoughtless imposition of the black label upon Obama, suggesting possible reasons for his allowing Americans to minimize or ignore his substantially more dominant white heritage. Without suggesting specific regimes for categorization, the essay concludes by arguing that the time has come for public and private law to recognize different degrees of blackness, especially now that the country’s census allows Americans to categorize themselves in more than one racial group…

Read the entire article here.