{"id":50934,"date":"2016-12-26T22:16:12","date_gmt":"2016-12-26T22:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50934"},"modified":"2016-12-26T22:16:12","modified_gmt":"2016-12-26T22:16:12","slug":"on-the-first-asian-american-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50934","title":{"rendered":"On the First Asian-American President"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the First Asian-American President<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Vogue<\/a>
\n2016-12-21<\/p>\n

Eric Chang<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given the poise with which Barack Obama<\/a> has taken on his role as president (measured here at minimum by the absence of personal scandal<\/a>, gaffes, or brushes with death via pretzel<\/a>), it\u2019s easy to forget how difficult it was to imagine a figure even approximately like him, prior to 2004. The concept of a black president was once a rhetorical construct used to highlight unlikelihood, if not outright impossibility, up there with winged pigs and a frozen inferno. So entrenched was the hegemony of white male leadership in America that in 1998, Toni Morrison<\/a> wrote the following of then-President Bill Clinton<\/a> in The New Yorker<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(to no terrific protest): \u201cYears ago . . . one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children\u2019s lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much has been made of this designation. It\u2019s been frequently misattributed to Morrison alone, when by her own account she was reporting a thesis aggregated from several different conversations (those \u201cmurmurs,\u201d collected from her community). It\u2019s also been decontextualized to insidious effect, often in attempts to bolster Bill Clinton\u2019s bona fides as a champion of black Americans…<\/p>\n

…The visceral recognition I and Asian-Americans like me see in President Obama rests on a similar foundation, and so I frame my argument as an intentional parallel to Morrison\u2019s: Black skin notwithstanding, this is our first Asian-American president…<\/p>\n

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

On the First Asian-American President Vogue 2016-12-21 Eric Chang Given the poise with which Barack Obama has taken on his role as president (measured here at minimum by the absence of personal scandal, gaffes, or brushes with death via pretzel), it\u2019s easy to forget how difficult it was to imagine a figure even approximately like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,63,8,26,20],"tags":[25877,1240,25252,25713],"class_list":["post-50934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-eric-chang","tag-toni-morrison","tag-vogue","tag-vogue-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50934","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=50934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50935,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50934\/revisions\/50935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}