Black or white
Every time I hear Barack Obama referred to as America’ first black president, I wonder how people buy into such a myth, as I have seen pictures of his very white mother and recently deceased obviously white grandmother.
To call him black is to cast dishonour on half of his heritage. Something that I can’t imagine someone as sensitive as Obama doing.
Tiger is not black and he has made that clear. He is mixed racial origin. Obama shares the same mixed race origin yet he is looked upon as America’s First Black President, and I have never seen him referred to as being of mixed origin, though he obviously is.
If one looks at older American legal cases from the South, one will quickly run into definitions of blackness that correspond to the present illusion regarding Obama’s blackness.
A drop of black blood is enough to turn any individual, for legal purposes, into a black person. The other similar situation that comes to mind is the laws propagated by the Nazis which of course in that situation was a matter of life and death. In both of these historical examples, the amount of black or Jewish blood that allowed one to be categorised as “black” or “Jewish” was of a smaller percentage than the 50% white blood that Obama carries.
Yet no-one questioned Obama about his being white. The only early concern had to do with whether he was black enough – culturally, socially, politically – to represent the black community. He obviously PASSED.
Is the black community and tens of millions of whites so anxious to crown a black president that they will accept a definition of black that is both imposed by the enemy and cancels the main formative influence on his life: his white mother? He was the victim of what Bill Cosby has been campaigning about: the absent black father, yet it is the father’s identity he bears, not that of the white mother who raised him and imbued him with her values.
I find all this very strange and indicative of a large unresolved American relationship to its racial history. Coming from a religious background that is racially based: to the orthodox, only those born of a Jewish mother are Jews. It is a view I share as I do not recognize converts as Jews and Sammy Davis, Marilyn Monroe et al. are not Jewish in my eyes as they were not born, as I was, of a Jewish mother.
