First let me say that this is a rhetorical question. I don’t expect anyone except me to answer this. And I am addressing this question primarily to white Americans, though I welcome anyone to read it. And for full disclosure, I am a white descendant of Colonial era European white people, as well as later white, European immigrants. I’ve got ancestry from Germany, Denmark, France, Scotland, Ireland, England, Spain, Sweden, Italy, and probably other countries.
Barack Hussain Obama was the forty-fourth President of the United States of America, and the first President who was black – African American as we now say.
I was proud of my country when we elected him, and proud of the eight years of his Presidency. I felt our country had turned a corner, and finally put a good chunk of our racist story behind us. I expected some backlash from the racists I knew were still here, but I didn’t expect Trump to rise to power and stoke that racial hatred for political gain, at least not successfully. He did, and they were emboldened, and here we are facing a national crisis and perhaps the end of the American democratic experiment. But only part of that can be credited to racism.
Of course Barack Obama isn’t all black. His mother was white. And in the bigger picture, race is a construct based strictly on physical appearance, as all humans are one species of beings. Humans are Homo Sapiens, the last of the genus Homo, in the family Hominidae, in the order of Primates, in the class of Mammalia, in the Phylum Chordata, and belonging to the kingdom Animalia.
We are Animals. We are Primates. We descended from the same ancestors as Chimpanzees and Bonobos. But what separates us from the other Primates is identical in all humans – regardless of skin color or body shape.
Race, as we define it by color, is immaterial in every way except the social constructs we have formed around those apparent physical attributes, and the locality of the tribes we emanated from.
But when we talk about race, the difference in skin color becomes very important to people. Should it be? I’d like to think not, but we are a long way from seeing the distinction of skin color disappear from our global consciousness.
Now back to Barack Obama. His father was black and his mother was white. Yet most of the time we refer to him as black, rather than as multi-racial, or of mixed-race. Why is that? The reason is racism.
If we call Barack Obama black because he had one black parent, we could just as easily call him white for the color of his other parent. It can’t be because his mother was the white one, as we don’t call people white if their father was white and mother was black.
The reason we do this is because his whiteness is inconsequential. It is ordinary and unremarkable. Every previous President had a white mother. But they also had a white father. What matters is that some of Obama’s ancestry is black. Half of it, which is more than enough to make him black. I say more than enough because our racial history in this country (and elsewhere) defines just about any percentage of black ancestry as black. Even “one drop” of African ancestry made a person black.
This seems absurd from any viewpoint that doesn’t have standards of racial hierarchy. The one drop rule was supposed to represent any visible trace of African ancestry, yet someone whose blackness couldn’t be seen was said to be “passing” as white. So even someone who was outwardly white, could still be looked down on if it could be shown that somewhere in their past a black person was in their gene pool. An expression I heard as a teenager when listening to some racist questioning the ancestry of some person on TV said this in a most disgusting and denigrating way. “I bet somewhere in his family’s past there was a n****r in the wood pile.”
Terms like mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon were used to describe percentages of black blood.
For racists Obama was a n****r. It wouldn’t matter to them if it was just his grandfather who was black, or even his great-grandfather. Remember, it’s the one drop rule.
And for black people it’s a point of pride. A pride that is shared by non-racist whites as well. I know I felt it. I felt pride for our country, and vicarious pride for our nation’s black population, as they were our traditional underdogs, finally getting their due and achieving visible equality.
It doesn’t matter that his mother was white, as having white people in power is the status quo, the de facto standard we established. It was his blackness that stood out, for the good or bad, depending on your own racial acceptance.
Now, and ever since Trump rose to political power, the racists have been restored and blackness is again a sin that demotes someone to a lower condition – a tertiary standard below white women, who are themselves below white men. And for these empowered racists, any black person in power or holding status is there because they are black, and not because they’ve earned their position. DEI is a bogeyman word. To the racist, it doesn’t mean the promotion of diversity, equality, and inclusion of otherwise qualified persons; it means the unfair placement of an unqualified person into a role that would otherwise belong to a white person. Barack Obama’s election to the Presidency was a call to arms for the racists. A clarion call to action. The time for them to save America for true Americans – white Americans.
We heard them disparaging DEI constantly over the last decade. I listened to a panel of triggered white men say they worried if they saw their commercial airline flight was piloted by a black person, because DEI initiatives had imposed unqualified people into the job. Never mind that the requirements to be an airline pilot didn’t change when airlines started embracing DEI within their companies. There is no black pilot who took an easier test, or needed fewer hours of flight time, or any other metric that standards established as the qualifying criteria. The racist white men were justifying their racism in a way so obvious, that they should have just pulled white hoods on over their heads.
Since the arrival of Trump 2.0 in the White House, his government has not only demanded that all sectors of government and even private industry stop DEI initiatives, they have also begun systematically erasing the history of black achievement in government. (Along with the history of numerous other marginalized minority groups.)
I don’t know how long this will last, and I don’t know if we will get past this point in history without another civil war. But I believe what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said about the arc of the moral universe being long, but bending toward justice. And I will lock arms with anyone, regardless of skin color, who wants to see that justice comes fully to our country and the world.
So, Barack Obama is considered black because that matters to us, even though it really shouldn’t; and not considered white, because that is inconsequential, even though he is that color too. And even though neither of those physical attributes should matter, we continue to define people based on this. This unimportant presence of melanin in an otherwise equal human animal.