{"id":11522,"date":"2011-01-16T20:00:50","date_gmt":"2011-01-16T20:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11522"},"modified":"2011-10-27T19:35:56","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T19:35:56","slug":"hes-not-black","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11522","title":{"rendered":"He’s Not Black"},"content":{"rendered":"

He’s Not Black<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Washington Post
\n<\/a>2008-11-30
\n\u00a0
\nMarie Arana<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

He is also half white.<\/p>\n

Unless the one-drop rule<\/a> still applies, our president-elect is not black.<\/p>\n

We call him that\u2014he calls himself that\u2014because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There’s no in-between.<\/p>\n

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: \u201cObama<\/a> Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President.\u201d<\/p>\n

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It’s as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South<\/a>. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.<\/p>\n

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama<\/a> is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the entire opinion piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He’s Not Black The Washington Post 2008-11-30 \u00a0 Marie Arana He is also half white. Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black. We call him that\u2014he calls himself that\u2014because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,394,20],"tags":[5206,2875],"class_list":["post-11522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-marie-arana","tag-the-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11522\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}