Mixed Race Studies

Why Obama is African American, Not Biracial

New America Media
Commentary
2008-12-18

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Here’s the ‘What is President-elect Barack Obama—black, biracial or multiracial?’ quiz. If he did not have one of the world’s most recognizable names and faces, he would fume at being turned away from restaurants, bypassed by taxis, racially profiled by police on street corners, refused from viewing an apartment by landlords, followed in stores by security guards, denied a loan for his business or home purchase, confined to living in a segregated neighborhood, or passed over for a corporate management position.

He would not be spared any of these routine petty harassments and annoyances—the subtle and outright forms of discrimination—because he checked the biracial designation on his census form. That’s a meaningless, feel-good, paper designation that has no validity in the hard world of American race politics.

The deepest part of America’s racial fault has always been and still remains the black and white divide. This has spawned legions of vile but durable racial stereotypes, fears and antagonisms. Black males have been the special target of negative typecasting. They’ve routinely been depicted as crime prone, derelict, sexual menaces and chronic underachievers. University researchers recently found that Obama’s win didn’t appreciably change these stereotypes.

The roughly six million or 2 percent of Americans who checked the biracial census box may take comfort in trying to be racially precise, but most also tell of their own bitter experience in feeling the sting of racial bigotry in the streets and workplace. Obama can too, and he has related his racial awakening in his best selling bare-the-soul autobiograhy “Dreams from My Father.”

Despite his occasional references to his white mother and grandmother, Obama has never seen himself as anything other than African American. That worked for and against him during the campaign. In countless polls and surveys, the overwhelming majority of whites said that they would vote for an African American for president, and that competence and qualifications, not color, were the only things that mattered. Many meant it and showed it by enthusiastically cheering him on. More than a few didn’t. Despite the real and feigned color-blindness, nearly 60 percent of whites still did not vote for Obama. Most based their opposition to him on Republican political loyalties, ties, regional and personal preferences. But a significant minority of white voters did not for him because he’s black, and they did not hide their feelings about that in exit polls in the Democratic primaries and the general election. Tagging him as multiracial or biracial did not soften their color resistance to him, let alone change their perception that he was black…

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