{"id":15964,"date":"2011-09-01T18:26:29","date_gmt":"2011-09-01T18:26:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=15964"},"modified":"2013-08-19T20:43:48","modified_gmt":"2013-08-19T20:43:48","slug":"obamas-my-dad-mixed-race-suspects-political-anxiety-and-the-new-imperialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=15964","title":{"rendered":"‘Obama’s My Dad’: Mixed Race Suspects, Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Obama’s My Dad’: Mixed Race Suspects, Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture<\/a>
\nVolume 10, Number 1<\/a> (2011)<\/p>\n

Rachel Gorman<\/strong>, Lecturer
\nWomen and Gender Studies Institute
\nUniversity of Toronto<\/em><\/p>\n

In this article I will argue that the ideology of white supremacy is currently being reproduced as an ideology of political supremacy. I explore narratives of Obama<\/a> and my father, and bring a transnational feminist framework to an examination of ontological and cultural ideologies of mixed race identity.<\/p>\n

All my life I have encountered suspicion about my race. As a child in a working class neighbourhood of Toronto, Canada<\/a> in the 1970s, my mixed race identity seemed to be an ontological threat to my European immigrant and white settler neighbours, and my ‘Mediterranean’ appearance rendered me unintelligible in relation to Blackness As a pre-teen transplanted to Muscat, Oman<\/a> in the 1980s, I was intelligible as Arab, which, given Oman’s historical and geographical proximity to Eastern Africa, did not preclude African ancestry. While I was unremarkable at the national school, I was questioned by British ‘expats’ when I circulated in the international neighbourhood, despite (or perhaps because of) the presence of several mixed families. Back in Toronto during the aggressive intensification of war and occupation in the Middle East in the 2000s, my racial ambiguity has become suspicious in new ways. I am dating this shift from September 2000, the beginning of the second Intifada, not September 2001, when the New American Century went prime time. Much happened between the two Septembers–mass protests at the summit on the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas at Qu\u00e9bec City<\/a> in April 2001; the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa<\/a> in August 2001. In the weeks following Durban, the global struggle to maintain white supremacy was recast as the will to reestablish American political supremacy. It was also during this time that, as an antiwar and anti-occupation organizer, my racial ambiguity was reconstituted through suspicions over whether I harbour dangerous worldviews…<\/p>\n

…A phenomenology of race is useful to continue to dispel the illusions of white supremacists who argue that Obama’s presidency means we are living in a post-racist world. Indeed, there are many questions to be asked about how mixed race people are emerging as tropes of the triumph of a liberal brand of diversity\u2014as Kimberley DaCosta<\/a> argues, the identity ‘multiracial’ emerged in the US context in part through a struggle over racial categories on government forms, and in part through niche market recognition. In order to resist the tendency to analytically collapse antiracism into advocacy for market inclusion, we need a phenomenology of race that allows us to grasp both ontology and culture in relation to political consciousness…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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

‘Obama’s My Dad’: Mixed Race Suspects, Political Anxiety and the New Imperialism thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture Volume 10, Number 1 (2011) Rachel Gorman, Lecturer Women and Gender Studies Institute University of Toronto In this article I will argue that the ideology of white supremacy is currently being reproduced as an ideology […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,19,8,26,394,20],"tags":[4084,181,517,7407,7059,7058],"class_list":["post-15964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-canada","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-kimberly-dacosta","tag-kimberly-mcclain-dacosta","tag-minelle-mahtani","tag-rachel-gorman","tag-thirdspace","tag-thirdspace-a-journal-of-feminist-theory-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15964","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=15964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}