{"id":776,"date":"2009-09-20T01:43:35","date_gmt":"2009-09-20T01:43:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=776"},"modified":"2017-06-15T19:54:04","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T19:54:04","slug":"obama-the-instability-of-color-lines-and-the-promise-of-a-postethnic-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=776","title":{"rendered":"Obama, The Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama, The Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters<\/a>
\nVolume 31, Number 4<\/a> (2008)
\npages 1033\u20131037
\nDOI: 10.1353\/cal.0.0282<\/a><\/p>\n

David A. Hollinger<\/a><\/strong>, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History
\nUniversity of California at Berkeley<\/em><\/p>\n

The focus of media depictions of Barack Obama<\/a> as a \u201cpost-racial,\u201d \u201cpost-black\u201d or \u201cpostethnic\u201d candidate is usually limited to two aspects of his presidential campaign.\u00a0 First is his self-presentation with minimal references to his color. Unlike Jesse Jackson<\/a> or Al Sharpton<\/a>, whose presidential candidacies were more directed at the significance of the color line, Obama has never offered himself as the candidate of a particular ethnoracial group. Second, the press calls attention to the willingness of millions of white voters to respond to Obama.\u00a0 Some of his greatest margins in primary elections and caucuses were in heavily white states like Idaho and Montana.\u00a0 He even won huge numbers of white voters in some states of the old Confederacy<\/a>, and in the November election carried Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.<\/p>\n

But there is much more to it…<\/p>\n

…Obama\u2019s mixed ancestry generates some of the new uncertainty about blackness. \u00a0The white part of his genetic inheritance is not socially hidden, as it often is for \u201clight-skinned blacks\u201d who descend from black women sexually exploited by white slaveholders and other white males. Rather, Obama\u2019s white ancestry is right there in the open, visible in the form of the white woman who, as a single mother, raised Obama after his black father left the family to return to his native Kenya. Press accounts of Obama\u2019s life, as well as Obama\u2019s own autobiographical writings, render Obama\u2019s whiteness hard to miss. \u00a0No public figure, not even Tiger Woods<\/a>, has done as much as Obama to make Americans of every education level and social surrounding aware of color-mixing in general and that most of the \u201cblack\u201d population of the United States, in particular, are partially white. The \u201cone-drop rule<\/a>\u201d which denies that color is a two-way street is far from dead, but not since the era of its legal and social consolidation in the early 1920s has the ordinance of this rule been so subject to challenge….<\/p>\n

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

Obama, The Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters Volume 31, Number 4 (2008) pages 1033\u20131037 DOI: 10.1353\/cal.0.0282 David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History University of California at Berkeley The focus of media depictions of Barack Obama as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,20],"tags":[4284,8266,112,166,82,105],"class_list":["post-776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-callaloo","tag-callaloo-a-journal-of-african-diaspora-arts-and-letters","tag-david-a-hollinger","tag-david-hollinger","tag-one-drop-rule","tag-tiger-woods"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776","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=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54239,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions\/54239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}