Is Barack Obama black?

[Syne]

Simple question.

Is Barack Obama black? Was he the first black US President?

[confused2]

?
American.
?
Is this a "just one drop" thing?
Like back in the day people would spread scurrilous stories about presidential candidates having African ancestors instead of sex with porn stars - all completely untrue, of course.
There's an Earlier one?

[C C]

After the mulatto category was dropped by the US census circa 1930, a biracial person of that type had to identify as either black (negro) or white. Perhaps depending on what their skin color allowed them to do. But even after 2000, someone could still freely identify solely as black or white[1], but options are -- of course -- now available for selecting multiple ethnic ancestry. 

Most biracial people identify as such[2], but they can opportunistically denote themselves as white or black in some situations where that benefits them. Biracial celebrities today may often identify as Black for the last reason in FN#2 --they probably don't want "privilege" undermining their career. Compared to the past, when designating one's self as white would have instead been the expedient choice (if skin color permitted).

In the quota regime era, businesses are prone to hire Blacks not even descended from US slavery and historic Jim Crow oppression (India, Caribbean/SA, Africa and Oceania, some Middle Easterners, etc). Which arguably emphasizes how "Black" qualification is not dependent on African American legacy.

So there are three areas that Obama could ground a "Black" classification in: The census tradition of decades earlier; that restrictive mono-racial classification still being optionally available by choice today for a biracial individual; and retrospectively the quota regime itself ironically capitalizing "Black" and thereby somewhat deprecating "African American" (those of pre-1960s heritage) in order to be more inclusive of the wider, global ancestry of people of color.[3]

The other issue: Was Obama the first black POTUS? --> African heritage of presidents of the United States

- - - footnotes - - -

[1] CNN (2008): "A columnist examining Obama's background summed up his racial identity into one equation: white + black = black. For me, that said it all."

[2] How multi-ethnic people identify themselves (NPR):

Ms. KHANNA: So this study looks at black-white biracial Americans and how they racially identify themselves, and that was the first thing we found, that most identify themselves to others as biracial or multiracial or mixed-race. These terms are certainly becoming much more common today. But in some situations, they identify themselves mono-racially, as black of white.

CONAN: In some situations. For example?

Ms. KHANNA: So for example, so we found individuals would present themselves as black or white. As white, you know, not uncommon were people presenting themselves as white in the workplace, for example, to, you know, they perceived it was advantageous for them to do so to move up in the workplace and move ahead, climb that ladder.

So we see some of that still happening today, although less so than individuals who are presenting themselves as black. And there were a number of situations where that seemed to come in handy. So, for example, during adolescence to fit in with black peers, you know, in adolescence, we all want to fit in.

So it's not surprising. So in these situations, they oftentimes conceal their white ancestry, the fact that they had a white parent, to present themselves as black.

In other situations, they presented themselves as black when they found whiteness to be somehow stigmatized and negatively stereotyped, and they didn't want to be associated with it. So they might have perceived whiteness as somehow bad.

Or one individual talked about perceiving whites as oppressive or the oppressor and not wanting to have basically anything to do with that. So in those situations, they would present themselves exclusively as black.

[3] Why we capitalize ‘Black’ (and not ‘white’): And, as my CJR colleague Alexandria Neason told me recently, “I view the term Black as both a recognition of an ethnic identity in the States that doesn’t rely on hyphenated Americanness (and is more accurate than African American, which suggests recent ties to the continent) and is also transnational and inclusive of our Caribbean [and] Central/South American siblings.” To capitalize Black, in her view, is to acknowledge that slavery “deliberately stripped” people forcibly shipped overseas “of all other ethnic/national ties.” She added, “African American is not wrong, and some prefer it, but if we are going to capitalize Asian and South Asian and Indigenous, for example, groups that include myriad ethnic identities united by shared race and geography and, to some degree, culture, then we also have to capitalize Black.”

[Syne]

It is a long white supremacist notion that just "one drop" of non-white blood requires identifying them as non-white, regardless of skin tone. The idea that mixed-race would be ignorant of that (thanks to poor performing Democrat-run public schools) or, worse, use that supremacist language opportunistically, would be a great affront to blacks... if they didn't also adopt the n-word to use towards one another.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/0qmgrMyuTAA

[confused2]

If Martin Luther King of "I have a dream" fame could have seen the Obamas become POTUS anf FLOTUS I don't think he'd have worried about the technicalities of biracialness. To go from "Does he have even a drop of black blood?" to "Does he have enough black blood?" .. maybe time to go out and get a life.

[C C]

It's hardly unknown for segments of far-Right European chauvinists to have a degree of Black ancestry.[1] The forefathers of some klansmen probably jumped on that particular bandwagon just to obscure via such zealotry the fact that they had mixed heritage.

Later descendants (whether belonging to the KKK, neo-Nazis, etc) make the discovery by subjecting themselves to the Find Your Roots and DNA analysis fads of today, or gradually realize it by (as they crudely put it) "our family being known for occasionally dropping a calf with frizzly hair and slightly dark complexion".

In the end, their having that bit of "impure blood" seems to have no effect. As they have long since (at least superficially) shifted to cultural chauvinism rather than still locked on the older "race" fixation.

Years ago, it was either assessed or speculated that the average African American probably had as much as 33% to 38% European ancestry. Now that seems to have fallen back to plus or minus 20% range (lower in the South).[2]

Another wild aspect of a "biracial" identity is that you could be as little indigenous as me (one-eighth), and before the 2000s a registrar would often still record you solely as Native American. Despite appearing so white that you could walk unidentified through an anger-fest about privileged population groups and get a tomato thrown at you.

Some card-holders have black ancestry, too, rather than being biracially white. As strange as it might sound at first, it was at times an advantage for a Black family, in the past era of discrimination, to be able to justify that they were also "Indian". Depending on the location in the country, territory, or the frontier -- as well as the (local reputation of the) particular tribe.

With respect to being "indigenous", you've got to have a CDIB to validate ancestral enrollment and potentially qualify as a tribal member (if more steps are required). You could look as Native as Geronimo, but without that you might as well be as Euro-laden and undocumented as Elizabeth Warren.

- - - footnotes - - -

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/...-americans

EXCERPT: At least 3.5% of European Americans carry African ancestry, though the averages vary significantly by state. In South Carolina and Louisiana, about 12% of European Americans have at least 1% African ancestry.


[2] https://psmag.com/news/how-slavery-chang...-americans

EXCERPT: The genetic mix of African and European DNA, however, follows a striking geographical trend: African Americans living in Southern states have more African DNA (83 percent) than those living in other areas of the country (80 percent). Conversely, African Americans outside the South have a larger fraction of European DNA. Even within the South, this trend holds: Blacks in Florida and South Carolina have more African DNA than those living in Kentucky and Virginia.

One explanation for this geographical bias could be that interracial marriages have been less frequent in Southern states. But this explanation appears to be wrong. The McGill researchers found that most of the European DNA among blacks today probably entered the African-American gene pool long before the Civil War, when the vast majority of blacks in the U.S. were slaves living in the South. The genetic patterns observed by the researchers suggest that, for at least a century before the Civil War, there was ongoing admixture between blacks and whites. After slavery ended, this interracial mixing dropped off steeply.

The implication of these findings won’t be surprising to anyone: Widespread sexual exploitation of slaves before the Civil War strongly influenced the genetic make-up of essentially all African Americans alive today.

But this poses a puzzle: If African Americans can trace most of their European ancestry to an era when America’s black population was overwhelmingly confined to the South, why is it that African Americans now living outside the South have more European DNA?

The researchers propose an interesting answer. They argue that the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South was genetically biased: African Americans with a higher fraction of European ancestry, who often have lighter skin, had better social opportunities and were thus in a better position to migrate to northern and Western states. Though it will take further evidence to show this definitively, the McGill researchers’ results imply that, even after the end of slavery, discrimination that varied with shades of skin color continued to influence the genetic history of African Americans.

[Syne]

MLK Jr. would have had a problem with the "quality of [Obama's] character," and less concerned with the "color of his skin." Not only with him playing the race card and completely failing to improve the lives of blacks (which Trump then did with historically low minority unemployment), but also significantly harming race relations in the US.