Why Do We Consider Obama to Be Black?
A historical look at the the persistence of the
New America Media, Commentary, Ronald Takaki, Posted: Oct 25, 2008
Editor's Note: Historian and scholar Ronald Takaki uncovers the origins of the "one drop" rule that was key to defining race early in America's history, and ponders whether we will ever move past it - even with a mixed race presidential candidate. Takaki, emeritus professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (updated edition to be published by Little, Brown in December).
Barack Obama is the son of a white mother and a black father. In Latin America, he would be identified as “mulatto” or half white and half black, and in South Africa as “colored” or between white and black.
Why are all African Americans, regardless of their mixed racial heritage, identified as black? What are the origins of the uniquely American “one drop” rule?
The first 20 Africans were landed in Jamestown in 1619. Yet, the planter class did not rush to bring more laborers from Africa. The elite wanted to reproduce an English society in America. By 1670, only 5 percent of the Virginia population was African.
Six years later, the planters abandoned their vision of a homogeneous society. During Bacon’s Rebellion, armed white and black laborers marched to Jamestown and burned it to the ground. After reinforcements of British troops had put down the insurrection, the planters turned to Africa as their primary source of labor: they wanted workers who could be enslaved and disarmed by law based on the color of their skin. The African population inclined upward to 40 percent.
The planters also stigmatized the complexion of the African laborer. They had earlier passed a law which law provided that the child of a slave mother would inherit the status of the mother, regardless of the race of the father. Thus a child of a slave mother and a white father would be a slave.
After Bacon’s Rebellion, the elite passed another law which enslaved the child of a white mother and a black father.
These two laws gave birth to the “one drop” rule. To be black, even part black was to be a slave, and to be a slave was to be black.
This denial of racial mixture has ricocheted down the corridors of history to the very candidacy of Barack Obama.
What can we do to free ourselves from this insidious “one drop” rule?
All of us can acknowledge that 80 percent of African Americans, most Latinos, and a growing segment of the Asian American population are of mixed racial heritage.
Many of us can accept and assert our multiracial selves with our roots reaching around the world. We can check more than one box for race in the U.S. Census. We can be like Tiger Woods, who identifies himself as a “Cablasian” – Caucasian, black and Asian.
As our society approaches the time when minorities will become a majority of the total U.S. population, we can redefine “race” in America.
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User Comments
African Abroad on Oct 28, 2008 at 16:29:26 said:
Barack is not Black. He is African American. He is not of American slave ancestry and therefore not heir to that specific legacy.
See: globalafrica.blogspot.com/2008/10/barack-is-not-black.html
John Hammons on Oct 26, 2008 at 13:34:50 said:
the question is, what's wrong with Obama being a black man. If what you suggest is true, than African-Americans as a people should deny their obvious ancestral link to being "Black" and identify as "mixed" or "mulatto", even if their multiracial heritage is the product of generations of unwillfull sex between slave masters and the enslaved, and even more centuries of government supported propoganda that has sought to remove any sense of pride in black people, that has encouraged us to want to identify with being something else, we can be black dark and nappy but hold firmly to the "great great great white grandfather" we have as to affirm that we are not black and therefore unattractive and unworthy.
Barack Obama is a Black man with a Black wife and Black daughters, and if it makes you or any one else feel better to denouce the obvious, meaning what you see the minute you see him and keep reminding you that he is "mixed" or "not that black" or "not all the way black" and therefore less threatening and easier for you or others to identify with than continue to live in your delusional white supremist world.
Tideswellman on Oct 25, 2008 at 08:40:08 said:
The reality is as a mixed race man...we tend to look more black than white. There are some people with miked heritage who look more white than black. But if you have African featurea and clearly brown skin people tend to label you as black as opposed to white. When we look in the mirror we dont see our white heritage the blacj heritage is more obvious.
-->That is why ..its what is obvious.