{"id":30808,"date":"2013-07-14T16:55:08","date_gmt":"2013-07-14T16:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30808"},"modified":"2016-06-06T00:30:40","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T00:30:40","slug":"well-if-you-were-to-ask-him-president-obama-is-black-he-is-african-american","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30808","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Well, if you were to ask him. President Obama is black. He is African-American.&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www2.kuow.org\/about\/staff.php?staff=1270\" target=\"_blank\">Steve Scher<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cWhat is <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Barack_Obama\" target=\"_blank\">President Obama<\/a>?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.com.washington.edu\/joseph\/\" target=\"_blank\">Ralina Joseph<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cWell, if you were to ask him. President Obama is black. He is African-American.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Steve Scher<\/strong>: \u201cYeah. When President Obama came out after the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin\" target=\"_blank\">Trayvon Martin killing<\/a> and he said, \u2018My kids would have looked like Trayvon Martin if they had been boys.\u2019&#8230; Let\u2019s unpack all of the things that were being said there. What was he saying about\u00a0<em>his<\/em> identity?\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ralina Joseph<\/strong>: \u201cSo, this is a really interesting question. I think that he is identifying as black and in the way which we have seen President Obama identify publically it has been as black. He has also talked about his white family. He\u2019s also famously referenced his mother from Kansas and his father from Kenya. But that has not precluded his identifying as African-American. I think that in real life that these identities are always together. They\u2019re very much a part of each other. They\u2019re fluidly understood. They\u2019re simultaneous. And yet, when we understand race, we think about them in these really separate binaristic manners. So it makes sense to me that he identifies very much with Trayvon Martin\u2019s family and also can talk about his white and Asian-American family, for example.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Steve Scher, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=30472\" target=\"_blank\">Ralina Joseph discusses her book Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial<\/a>,\u201d <em>Weekday with Steve Scher, KUOW.org Seattle, 94.9 FM<\/em>. (April 15, 2013). <a href=\"http:\/\/cpa.ds.npr.org\/kuow\/audio\/2013\/04\/WeekdayA20130415.mp3\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/cpa.ds.npr.org\/kuow\/audio\/2013\/04\/WeekdayA20130415.mp3<\/a>\u00a0(00:18:50-00:20:07).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steve Scher: \u201cWhat is President Obama?\u201d Ralina Joseph: \u201cWell, if you were to ask him. President Obama is black. He is African-American.\u201d Steve Scher: \u201cYeah. When President Obama came out after the Trayvon Martin killing and he said, \u2018My kids would have looked like Trayvon Martin if they had been boys.\u2019&#8230; Let\u2019s unpack all of [&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":[14428,14607,1980,1444,4749,14427],"class_list":["post-30808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excerpts","tag-kuow","tag-kuow-org","tag-ralina-joseph","tag-ralina-l-joseph","tag-ralina-landwehr-joseph","tag-steve-scher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30808","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=30808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47350,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30808\/revisions\/47350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}