On today's Talk of the Nation there was a show with the title, Obama And The Politics Of Being Biracial. Here's the intro:
President-elect Barack Obama defines himself as African-American. His mother is a white American, and his father is a black African. This hits a nerve with some people, who wonder why Obama doesn't use the term biracial to describe his race.
The obvious answer is that the United States Barack Obama looks black. Some of the guests noted this. That being said, I was a bit peeved with the fact that there wasn't even a nominal nod to the fact that there are many biracial people who are not of mixed black & white ancestry, and the conventions and dynamics which are operative in their lives are different. A caller brought up Halle Berry, and how America seemed to have no problem with the fact that she identified as black. Halle Berry is a black actress, though she did note that she enjoyed the fact that her role in The Rich Man's Wife was not color-coded. But Halle Berry does not have the freedoms of someone like Jennifer Lopez, who is racially ambiguous enough to play a white woman in Out of Sight. But Jennifer Lopez is not "officially" biracial, so I thought I would make the point by contrasting Berry with two other biracial (if comparatively obscure) women who have been in films, Norah Jones and Kristen Kreuk. To my knowledge Norah Jones did not play a half-brown woman in My Blueberry Nights, while Kreuk is "white enough" to play Snow White for a Hallmark movie. Imagine if one of the Mowery sisters (biracial) were to play Snow White! Obviously if you browse photos of Jones you won't be totally surprised that her full name is "Geethali Norah Jones Shankar," her South Asian features are pretty obvious after the fact. Similarly, the fact that Kreuk is half-Chinese isn't surprising either, like some biracial people different photos seem to favor either side of her ancestry. In Partition she even played a Punjabi Muslim woman. With the election of the biracial Barack Obama perhaps there will a tendency to implicitly frame the "biracial" question around the black-white dichotomy. In fact, the way the term biracial is used it is often clear that the individual using the term is referring to the two classical races of the United States, black and white. But here's some quantitative reality:
According to James P. Allen and Eugene Turner from California State University, Northridge, by some calculations the largest part white bi-racial population is white/American Indian and Alaskan Native, at 7,015,017, followed by white/black at 737,492, then white/Asian at 727,197, and finally white/Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander at 125,628.
This of course ignores the multiraciality of most Latinos in the United States, who are bracketed in their own catchall category. But the point is that this isn't 1950, blacks aren't even the largest ethnic minority. It's time to broaden the discourse. Barack Obama is recognized as a black man because the social power of black ancestry and appearance is great. But Obama has a sister. In the PBS documentary The Choice one of Barack Obama's colleagues from Chicago referred to the fact that despite his conscious identification with the black community, he still reached out to all people, and after all he did have a "white sister." Of course his sister is biracial too, her father just happened to be Indonesian, not African. Therefore, I guess an honest mistake?
