Sometimes I feel a bit strange that we call Barack Obama our first black president. As we are all well aware, really he's biracial, but it's as if we called it "close enough" in order usher in the historical moment with that much more vigor.
Perhaps we consider him black more so than biracial because his father is African, and therefore passed on a stronger presence of those genes than many African-Americans would. I don't know the stats, but we know that many African-Americans have Caucasian blood woven into them, so it makes sense that the combination of his father's genes with those of his white mother would give him a similar biological makeup.
Or maybe we consider him more black because he married a black woman and had, for all intents and purposes, black children with her. The Obamas, based solely on appearance, look more like a black family than a biracial family.
But this is not about Barack Obama not being "black enough." Not at all. He can be anything and everything he is. But by labeling him "black" as opposed to biracial, is that not somewhat of a slight to the biracial people of this country? As the pot that is America continues to melt and each generation's heritage becomes more and more blended, would it not be far more encouraging to celebrate Obama's multicultural story?
The seeds of this thought were planted when I read a fellow scribe's blog the day after the 2008 election. A biracial person herself, she wrote, "I feel like America has seen me and has said that I’m okay. I really feel a part of America. My family has never given me reason to believe that I can’t achieve anything I want, but I think that today I truly believe it. I mean, there’s a biracial President headed to the White House and he didn’t have to pick or deny any part of himself to get there."
But as a nation, we kind of did pick, and maybe that's a shame. Perhaps we did ourselves a disservice in forcing Obama to fill in just one of those bubbles on the Scantron survey.
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