{"id":27741,"date":"2013-01-20T22:52:23","date_gmt":"2013-01-20T22:52:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=27741"},"modified":"2013-10-08T21:04:25","modified_gmt":"2013-10-08T21:04:25","slug":"obama-should-talk-about-being-biracial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=27741","title":{"rendered":"Obama Should Talk About Being Biracial"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama Should Talk About Being Biracial<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Daily Beast<\/a>
\n2013-01-20<\/p>\n

David Kaufman<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The President identifies as black, but David Kaufman hopes that during his second term, he\u2019ll also discuss his biracial heritage.<\/em><\/p>\n

Four years after he first entered the White House<\/a>, there\u2019s no longer anything surprising about calling Barack Obama<\/a>\u2014America\u2019s first black president\u2014a \u201ctransformational\u201d leader. Yet the full extent of Obama\u2019s transformational potential has yet to be realized in one realm: his biracial heritage.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s 1995 book Dreams from my Father<\/a><\/em> makes clear that his identity was influenced as much\u2014if not more\u2014by his Caucasian mother than his absentee African father. But since he won the Democratic nomination in 2008, both Obama and the media seem to have shut the closet door on his multi-culti background. With his black wife and children by his side, Obama certainly represents an aspirational\u2014and much-needed\u2014African-American cultural ideal. But with one half of his family history so conspicuously overlooked, whether by circumstance or design, that ideal is not the entire story of his identity.<\/p>\n

To a certain extent, I think it\u2019s been an act<\/strong>,\u201d San Francisco State University Professor Andrew Joliv\u00e9tte<\/a>\u2014editor of Obama and the Biracial Factor<\/a><\/em>, a collection of essays\u2014says of the president\u2019s mono-racial messaging. \u201cThe President has been afraid to speak more openly about being biracial because it could be read in so many different ways.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…With so few journalists actually asking the President about being mixed-race, Obama has conversely had very little to tell them. Or maybe because he\u2019s so publicly\u2014and repeatedly\u2014identified as black in the past, the President simply feels he has nothing left to reveal. \u201cSome might suggest he\u2019s purposely not talking about it, but perhaps his mixed heritage is no longer some on-going restless question for Obama,\u201d suggests Michele Elam<\/a>, Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. \u201cI don\u2019t think he\u2019s repressing his mixed heritage or capitulating to the \u2018one-drop\u2019 rule<\/a>,\u201d Elam continues. \u201cFor Obama, the choice to identify as black has never been merely about biology or blood<\/strong> … He sees blackness as containing differences of experience and ancestry.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

Obama Should Talk About Being Biracial The Daily Beast 2013-01-20 David Kaufman The President identifies as black, but David Kaufman hopes that during his second term, he\u2019ll also discuss his biracial heritage. Four years after he first entered the White House, there\u2019s no longer anything surprising about calling Barack Obama\u2014America\u2019s first black president\u2014a \u201ctransformational\u201d leader. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,125,8,26,20],"tags":[368,72,13448,1386,13384],"class_list":["post-27741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-andrew-j-jolivette","tag-andrew-jolivette","tag-david-kaufman","tag-michele-elam","tag-the-daily-beast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27741","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=27741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}