Throughout the presidential campaign, race keeps bubbling to the surface as a topic of discussion. Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising given that the Democratic nominee is the son of a White, American-born mother and a Black, Kenyan-born father. But why, then, is Barack Obama always referred to as "the first Black major party nominee for President?" Why do we never hear him called the first biracial nominee?
This is not a new development, the idea that individuals of mixed heritage are often lumped into more clearly delineated categories like "Black." The "one-drop" rule was a mainstay of the Jim Crow South, where someone with even one Black relative was classified as Black. With regard to religion, one Jewish grandparent was typically enough for classification as a Jew in Nazi Germany.
For that matter, even though we're decades removed from Jim Crow in the U.S., it wasn't until 2000 that the Census first allowed Americans to check off multiple boxes in response to the question regarding ethnicity. Before then, multi-racial individuals had to choose which of the clearly defined categories they wanted to shoehorn into or opt for the uninformative selection of "Other." As the Obama example illustrates, even with the U.S. Census change, we as a society may still be shoehorning multi-racial individuals in various ways.
Clearly Obama looks different than any previous U.S. presidential candidate. So while his lineage indicates that calling him "Black" is no more accurate than calling him "White," the former may have intuitive appeal because it recognizes this difference.
But there are other intriguing examples as well that paint a more clouded picture. How about Tiger Woods, the son of an African-American father and a mother with Thai, Chinese, and European ancestry? I don't recall reading many references in 1997 to Woods as the first Asian golfer to win the Master's, though such a conclusion would have been warranted.
And back to the domain of politics, I often follow the presidential election at www.electoral-vote.com/, one of the sites where you can track the race by the electoral map. A few months ago in exploring possible vice presidential picks for potential nominees Clinton or Obama, the site webmaster wrote the following:
"Clearly balancing a ticket headed by a white woman is different from balancing one headed by a black man. One thing is sure though: the Veep will be a white man. Everything else is wild speculation."
He then proceeded to list potential VP picks, starting with Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico:
"His presence on the ticket guarantees New Mexico's five electoral votes, which Bush won in 2004. Furthermore, since he is a Latino (his mother is Mexican) he will cement the Democrats' hold on the Latinos, which will help... in a variety of states, including Nevada, Colorado, and probably Florida."
In the scope of one analysis, a strong conclusion is offered that Obama needs to pick a White VP, Richardson is identified as a top possibility, and Richardson is identified as Latino. All of these assertions can't be true at the same time! Richardson, too, actually has a multi-ethnic background, as three of his four grandparents were Mexican citizens.
So it would seem that we as a society often still don't know what to make of the idea of multi-racial or multi-ethnic identities. We seem to prefer the simplicity of cut-and-dry categories like White, Black, Latino... Does this societal tendency matter? Well, yes and no.
At the level of stereotyping and discrimination, all that really matters is how society sees a person. That is, if a voter harbors prejudice against Black people and considers Obama to be Black, then it won't matter much that Obama actually self-identifies as biracial—this voter is going to vote for someone else.
But certainly it is an important issue from the perspective of one's identity. If I'm a child who sees myself as biracial or multi-racial, but I'm consistently told—explicitly and through more subtle means—that I'm "just this" or "just that," certainly that experience would be confusing. As an adult, I'd find it to be maddening, having my identity re-defined for me in this way by someone else.
This is an issue that will only prove to become more and more important in our society in the years to come, as the population rate of multi-racial individuals continues to grow. After all, by the time Tiger's daughter, Sam Woods, wins her first LPGA major title, no one will know whether to shoehorn her into "Black," "Thai," "Swedish," or a variety of other possible categories...
