{"id":22615,"date":"2012-04-22T19:35:45","date_gmt":"2012-04-22T19:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=22615"},"modified":"2016-10-16T18:12:41","modified_gmt":"2016-10-16T18:12:41","slug":"22615","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=22615","title":{"rendered":"In many ways, Obama&#8217;s story provides a possible model for black\u00ad descended multiracial people in that racial acceptance and success depends on an identity that is closely tied to blackness&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>In many ways, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Barack_Obama\" target=\"_blank\">Obama\u2019s<\/a> story provides a possible model for black\u00ad descended multiracial people in that racial acceptance and success\u00a0depends on an identity that is closely tied to blackness. In the larger\u00a0sense, Obama reconciles the tensions between what <a href=\"http:\/\/www.soc.ucsb.edu\/faculty\/g-reginald-daniel\" target=\"_blank\">G. Reginald Daniel<\/a> has called \u201cmultigenerational multiracials,\u201d that is to say, <strong>the category that most African Americans fall into as a racially mixed people<\/strong>, and \u201cfirst-generation\u201d multiracial people who have one parent that identifies as monoracially white and another that identifies as monoracially black. The question is: does this require an African American identification or can it simply be a multiracial identity that affirms one\u2019s connection to the African Diaspora and the black experience? Had Obama identified more with the white side of his parental lineage, or even more strongly as a mixed race person, <strong>many Americans might not today know the name Barack Obama.<\/strong> The important point to take away from this memoir is that in the end, the protagonist, the hero, does not choose a mixed race identity but, rather, an African American one. To do otherwise would surely have antagonized and alienated African American support and acceptance. Anything less than full and absolute acceptance of an African American identity would have cost\u00a0Obama severely.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Zebulon Vance Miletsky, \u201cMutt like me: Barack Obama and the Mixed Race Experience in Historical Perspective,\u201d in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=782\" target=\"_blank\">Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority<\/a><\/em>, edited by Andrew J. Joliv\u00e9tte (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2012), 149-150.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In many ways, Obama\u2019s story provides a possible model for black\u00ad descended multiracial people in that racial acceptance and success\u00a0depends on an identity that is closely tied to blackness. In the larger\u00a0sense, Obama reconciles the tensions between what G. Reginald Daniel has called \u201cmultigenerational multiracials,\u201d that is to say, the category that most African Americans [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[368,72,142,3709,3708,4091],"class_list":["post-22615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-andrew-j-jolivette","tag-andrew-jolivette","tag-g-reginald-daniel","tag-zebulon-miletsky","tag-zebulon-v-miletsky","tag-zebulon-vance-miletsky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22615","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=22615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49476,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22615\/revisions\/49476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}