Race to Define What is Race

Like Jasmine, I found the class discussions on race very interesting. And one of the first things that came to my mind was our president, Barack Obama. I remember reading an article which quoted him as saying something to the effect that if you so much as look like a black person in the United States, you are considered African-American. But coming here to New Orleans, I looked at some photos of men who had earned the reputation of being among the city's African-American mayors, but to me, they did not look African-American because they were so light. Apparently, race is not simply skin-deep. There is something called the one-drop rule that says if you have even one drop of African blood, you are African-American. Looking at the president's case is very interesting. To anybody looking at him for the first time, he appears to be a black man. And that he is, but some people during his campaign for president, and still today, forget his entire family on his mother's side was white. Would anybody dare label him European-American? On a side note, like Dr. Hunt said, I do not consider myself European-American. I may be white, but I have never been to Europe, nor has any member in my family even visited there once for several generations, much less been born and raised there. I am fully Amercan, as is my family.

Barack Obama likewise was not born and raised in Africa nor in Europe. He was born in Hawaii and raised in Indonesia and the Kansas. So is he Indonesian-American? He has no Indonesian blood, so it wouldn't make sense to say that. In respect to his African heritage, many "African-Americans" at first refused to support him because they could relate to him less than to white Americans because his black heritage is from East Africa. Most, if not all self-defined African-Americans are descendants of people from West Africa. Their ancestors suffered the horrible atrocity of slavery at the hands of European colonists and struggled to overcome racial discrimination in the civil rights movement. How could they let the son of a East African man become president and not suffer the discirimination and slavery that the ancestors of most-African Americans did? His black family had no involvement in fighting the discrimination. Why should he be allowed to reap the fruits of the movement without having family who struggled in it? And not only did Obama reap the fruits of the movement, he has reaped more fruits than any other African-American by being elected leader of arguably the most powerful nation in the world. It almost seems like he relied on African-American struggles to elevate himself to his current position. That is so interesting to me. His ancestors may have endured slavery, but at the hands of Arabs and Asians, not Europeans. Many consider Barack Obama to be a first-generation American because his dad was from Kenya, not the US. And he really had no contact with his father's Kenyan family until he was an adult. So in that sense, he may have African blood, but as a child and young adult, had no African traditions or cultural values because he was cut off from that side of his family.

How about calling Obama a creole? Would that be a feasible label? Supposedly his mother had a little bit of French blood, but most of her family had been from Ireland, Germany, and England. So unlike creoles here in New Orleans, he had no Spanish ancestry, no West African ancestry, no Carribean ancestry, and as far as is known, no Native American ancestry. During the actual presidential elections, many voted for him because he looked black; many refused to vote for him because he looked black. There were even reports of skinheads rallying together to assassinate him because he looked black, though his "blackness" did not make him relatable to other American blacks. It's such a complex issue, but fascinating at the same time. I guess what we should all remember was what my history teacher said last semester, that humans first arose from East Africa, so in reality, "We are all African." :)