{"id":20381,"date":"2012-02-06T00:45:23","date_gmt":"2012-02-06T00:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=20381"},"modified":"2012-02-06T00:45:23","modified_gmt":"2012-02-06T00:45:23","slug":"obama-blackness-and-postethnic-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=20381","title":{"rendered":"Obama, Blackness, and Postethnic America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama, Blackness, and Postethnic America<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Chronicle of Higher Education
\n2008-02-29<\/p>\n

David A. Hollinger<\/a><\/strong>, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
\nUniversity of California, Berkeley<\/em><\/p>\n

The Obama candidacy challenges our notions of identity politics<\/em><\/p>\n

In their support for Hillary Rodham Clinton<\/a> over Barack Obama<\/a>, prominent black leaders have made it clear that black skin color itself is not as big a deal in American politics as it once was. The spectacle of John Lewis<\/a>, Charles B. Rangel<\/a>, and Andrew Young<\/a>, among others, trying to persuade black Americans to vote for a white woman rather than the first black man with a real chance at the White House is a striking example of how the Obama campaign has become a postethnic phenomenon.<\/p>\n

There are plenty of other signs as well. In a society long accustomed to a sharp black-white color line \u2014 and to relying on the rule of “one drop of black blood<\/a>” to locate that line \u2014 commentators are discussing the choices of identity available to the mixed-race Obama. In a recent video on The New York Times<\/em> Web site, Glenn C. Loury<\/a> and John H. McWhorter<\/a>, two prominent black intellectuals, casually reviewed Obama’s range of options. Yet it was not so long ago that the lightskinned Colin Powell<\/a> declared matter-of-factly: “When you look like me, you are black.”…<\/p>\n

…Obama’s mixed ancestry, however, is not what most generates the new uncertainty about blackness. Much more important is the fact that his black ancestry is immigrant rather than American-born. Before getting to that, however, let me clarify the postethnic flavor of the support for Clinton on the part of a substantial segment of the black political establishment…<\/p>\n

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

Obama, Blackness, and Postethnic America The Chronicle of Higher Education 2008-02-29 David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History University of California, Berkeley The Obama candidacy challenges our notions of identity politics In their support for Hillary Rodham Clinton over Barack Obama, prominent black leaders have made it clear that black skin color itself […]<\/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],"tags":[9497,112,166,9500,9499,9498,2183],"class_list":["post-20381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","tag-chronicle-of-higher-education","tag-david-a-hollinger","tag-david-hollinger","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-hillary-r-clinton","tag-hillary-rodham-clinton","tag-the-chronicle-of-higher-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20381","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=20381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}