{"id":36268,"date":"2014-04-15T21:25:48","date_gmt":"2014-04-15T21:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36268"},"modified":"2014-04-15T21:58:05","modified_gmt":"2014-04-15T21:58:05","slug":"americans-say-obamas-not-black-how-pew-got-this-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36268","title":{"rendered":"Americans Say Obama\u2019s Not Black? How Pew Got This Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

Americans Say Obama\u2019s Not Black? How Pew Got This Wrong<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Root<\/a>
\n2014-04-14<\/p>\n

Jen\u00e9e Desmond-Harris<\/strong><\/a>, Senior Staff Writer and White House Correspondent<\/p>\n

Saying \u201cYes, Obama is mixed race\u201d is not the same as saying \u201cNo, he\u2019s not black.\u201d Racial Identity 101: You can be both.<\/em><\/p>\n

Twenty-seven percent of Americans say President Barack Obama<\/a> is black, while 52 percent say he’s mixed race.<\/p>\n

That’s part of a newly published Pew Research Center report<\/a> that has inspired jarring headlines like these about perceptions of the man commonly (formerly?) known as the first African-American president:<\/p>\n

“Is Barack Obama ‘Black’? A Majority of Americans Say No<\/a>”<\/p>\n

“Poll: Majority of Americans Say Obama Is Mixed-Race, Not Black<\/a>”<\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/em> calls the data “fascinating<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

But it’s actually not. The only thing fascinating (read: frustrating) is why Pew would force people to choose between these two options. By setting up “black” and “mixed race” as mutually exclusive, as it appears to have done in the “Obama: Black or<\/em> Mixed Race<\/a>” (emphasis mine) portion of its poll, it offered Americans a misleading choice that doesn’t reflect their social reality, and certainly doesn’t tell us anything new about how they see their president.<\/p>\n

If participants were, in fact, forced to choose between the two options, knowing that Obama self-identifies as black<\/a> and knowing, too, that he has a white parent and a black parent, it makes sense to assume that many people simply picked the most specific option: “mixed race.”<\/p>\n

That does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean they say “no” to his being black…<\/p>\n

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

Americans Say Obama\u2019s Not Black? How Pew Got This Wrong The Root 2014-04-14 Jen\u00e9e Desmond-Harris, Senior Staff Writer and White House Correspondent Saying \u201cYes, Obama is mixed race\u201d is not the same as saying \u201cNo, he\u2019s not black.\u201d Racial Identity 101: You can be both. Twenty-seven percent of Americans say President Barack Obama is black, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,33,8,20],"tags":[4760,3122,3234],"class_list":["post-36268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-census","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-jenee-desmond-harris","tag-pew-research-center","tag-the-root"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36268","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=36268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}