Barack Obama keeps referring to himself as a black man. Indeed he goes out of his way to stress that he is "African American." His parents as well as his friends all called him "Barry" when he was growing up, but Obama insisted on being called by his African given name: Barack. For two decades now he has attended a church which describes itself as authentically"black" and unashamedly "African." If this seems strange when you consider the fact that Obama has one black parent and one white parent, it is.
Obama's racial self-definition is derived from the famous, or infamous, one-drop rule which continues to hold sway in America but nowhere else. In other countries, say the nations of South America or Africa, if you have mixed blood you are considered mixed-race. It would be absurd to call a person who is 50 or even 70 percent white a "black" person. Why then does the United States use this weird rule according to which a single drop (or any visible presence) of blackness makes you automatically "black" and "African American"?
Many people think that the one-drop rule is a product of slavery. Not true. During slavery, the general rule was that slave status passed through the mother. In other words, if a white slave master had sexual relations with a female black slave, the offspring would automatically be considered a slave. By contrast, in the relatively rare case that a black slave produced a child with a free white woman, the offspring would be legally counted as white and therefore free. Obama has a white mother and a black father: in the antebellum South his racial status would pass through his mother.
The one-drop rule was a product of segregation and Jim Crow, not slavery. It developed in the postbellum South as a way to enforce a strict line of demarcation between black and white. Without such a rule an intermediate class of mixed-race mulattoes would make segregation increasingly difficult to enforce. Consequently the Southern ruling class mandated that even a modest trace of African heritage was sufficient to count as "black."
Strangely the one-drop rule has outlived segregation and is today embraced by the very groups the rule was designed to subjugate. Today the NAACP and the Black Caucus live by the one-drop rule, defining as "black" and "African American" anyone who has any discernible evidence of black ancestry. Reading Obama's The Audacity of Hope and his recent speech on race, I see no awareness of these ironies and no attempt to intelligently grapple with them. He is content to maunder about "complexity" and the need to "come together" despite our differences.
The deep question for Obama is not merely "how can America transcend race while continuing to have race-conscious policies?" but also "how can America transcend race as long as the one-drop rule remains intact?" Far from producing answers, Obama shows no recognition that these are even questions that need to be addressed. Meanwhile, Garry Wills in the current New York Review compares Obama's race speech to one of the great speeches of Abraham Lincoln. When I read this on the plane I almost lost my peanuts!
How embarrassing it is to see intellectuals like Wills and sophisticated magazines like the New York Review of Books and the New Republic fawn and grovel over Obama! You can be sure that if a white political candidate mouthed Obama's vague and vacuous nostrums, these liberals would not be issuing such hosannas. In this sense Geraldine Ferraro was right, not so much about Obama as about his white "amen corner." They are giving Obama something he has never asked for as a presidential candidate: intellectual affirmative action.
Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 37)
1. It took Barack Obama more than a year to repudiate his former pastor's racially charged anti-American tirades, but when it came to denouncing Don Imus for his racial slurs against the Rutgers girls basketball team, it took Obama only a week to demand the shock jock be fired.
arrogantobama at 10:35PM on Apr 13th 2008
2. Haikus for Dinesh...by jack handey
- - -
Train wreck, Dinesh is
Wow, and this blog entry so
proves it...yikes, man
- - -
Jesus, you've got to
Come back to the earth and get
rid of these morons
- - -
Wow, the fools who like
to follow this asswipe...I
don't think they're worth it
- - -
Now it's time to say
goodnight. Goodnight, sleep tight. Now the sun turns out ... whoops...
brandon at 10:57PM on Apr 13th 2008
3. Obama seems almost ashamed of his white background. The only time I've ever heard him awknowledge caucasian relatives, or more accurately that a relative was white was when he tried to justify his going to a racist black church by shouting that his white grandmother used to occassionally make questionable comments about another race. Whether she did or not doesn't really matter. What matters is that he felt it necessary to tarnish his grandmothers image during the last years of her life. I can't imagine any other candidate of any color at any time purposely disgracing his grandmother for the sake of winning political office. I lost all respect for Obama when I witnessed him making that speech.
Johnny Cardenas at 11:01PM on Apr 13th 2008
4. It's sad to see you resort to something this petty Dinesh. You are, indeed, a very small man.
Dan at 11:42PM on Apr 13th 2008
5. Did you hear Obama's speech, or even bother to read the transcript? Embarrassed by Wils' and or the "New Replublic" reaction to the speech? What are you, and people like you afraid of? A simple question for a desperately simple little man.
Rob Whitcomb at 11:43PM on Apr 13th 2008
6. The fact that Obama is where he is (the U.S. Senate) and one of three legit contenders for the White House would tell anyone outside of the U.S. that we are not a racist country. Are there racists? Of course, but they no longer have anywhere near the power they had to hold people significantly below their ability to achieve, which is the damaging aspect of racism. The idiots who hold up "God Hates Fags" signs may be filled with hate, but they have no power to hold down those WHOM they hate; and that is ostensibly what those fighting for civil rights have been advocating for. Now that we're there, the "goal line" has been moved to where anyone who says anything that offends is a racist, or those who feel uncomfortable around a culture they're unfamiliar with (a natural human tendency) are labeled as such - and people of conscience instinctively draw back from that.
The only people who want to keep alive the sins of the past are those who can exploit or profit from it. People will always congregate according to groups they feel comfortable with, there will always be bullies, and there will always be those who feel themselves superior to others for whatever reason (class, race, wealth, I.Q., etc.) -but that's a far cry from institutionalized racism, and as long as we keep making race THE issue, we simply make ourselves look childish.
Dave at 11:51PM on Apr 13th 2008
7. Obama-worshippers take note. This is REAL grappling with racial issues, not to be confused with the pablum you insist on gulping down.
Jay at 11:54PM on Apr 13th 2008
8.
This evening's hot steaming cup of stupid from D'Idiot.
Ah, the race baiting continues. D'Idiot, instead of actually advocating what he claims in this column, lashes out at those who "fawn and grovel over Obama." Y'know, kind of like moronic homophobes like D'stupid that 'fawn and grovel' when someone says maybe gays 'chose' to be that way.
Or wets himself when General Patreaus keeps insisting that the war isn't a money pit destined to baknrupt the nation becuase the surge is going well and we need to keep fighting.
Or God Nazi's that fall into drooling fits of hyperventalation when someone suggests that maybe the multi-religous nature of the US should be stomped into Christofascist submission.
Please. D'Idiot is like all the other snake-oil salesmen. Obama has a great chance at begining the long painful clean-up after 8 years of "My Little Goat" boy, and the best these dillweeds can do is say "I almost lost my peanuts."
News Flash, Stanford Man. You don't have any peanuts to lose. When you turned into a desperate shill for the party that mocks you behind your back the way some of us mock you on the blog, you gave up any peanuts you had to be the party's neutured minority poster poser, a falsettoed puppet that they can parade around and then send back to the cabin when your usefullness is over.
Which, by my estimate, will be 1/20/09.
Tim at 12:04AM on Apr 14th 2008
9. Dinesh - If nothing else, you can certainly get people mad enough to punch through their computer displays
Jerry at 12:37AM on Apr 14th 2008
10. you lost your peanuts years ago-
odin-t at 12:58AM on Apr 14th 2008
11. Dinesh doesn't make me angry, Jerry. I kind of pity the man for his petty hatreds and his relentless insistence that we share in those hatreds so as to soothe his ever-tattered ego.
D'Souza has a comically dysfunctional notion as to what constitutes freedom and equality in America. If anything, we really should be laughing at this little misguided fool rather allowing someone so obviously beneath us to enrage us.
Dan at 1:28AM on Apr 14th 2008
12. The real Barack Obama is bubbling to the surface everytime he doesn't have a prepared speech, he says something that offends people. Everytime his wife opens her mouth, the chip on her shoulder is exposed. They both have a big chip on their shoulders. These two people went to Ivy League schools, they look down on the people living in rural communities as gun toting, bible thumping Rednecks. Obama also would love to get rid of the second amendment, take away guns from people who like to go hunting. Then put his Marxist Agenda in place. Take away our rights as surely as Hugo Chavez is now doing to the people of Venezuela. In fact he would probably run down there to visit Chavez the day after he wins the election along with Sean Penn, Danny Glover and the rest of the Hollywood Morons who love all the dictators and terrorists. Obama, go there now and take Jimmy Carter who loves talking to Hamas terrorists with you. Or better yet, go run for Pres. of Kenya, your muslim cousin Odinga who is overthrowing the gov't there could use you to help run the country after he's done killing the Christians there while he takes over the country.
sc ofNJ at 1:52AM on Apr 14th 2008
13. BUH WAH HA HA HA HA!!! (HAW HAW HAW!) Dinesh is one of our NASTIEST Deep Cover agents! Every time he opens a nostril, he drives ANOTHER ninety-and-nine away from the putrid pollution that is Christianity!
HALE, THETAN!
If only Dinesh Disoupforbrains would convert to Mormonism or Scientology! Watching the big dilbert argue for the BENEFITS of the bloodthirsty mutation that is Chr*stianity is funny enough. Just IMAGINE him arguing for the historical verity of the Mulekites or the legal necessity of locking up suspected Xenu worshippers---no, no, I can't go on----laughing too hard -ag094uaqaCF&^^%#2$%36$46
Terrible Tommy Murray at 2:06AM on Apr 14th 2008
14. http://evolutionfacts.blogspot.com
FORMER ATHEIST at 2:45AM on Apr 14th 2008
15. http://evolutionfacts.blogtownhall.com/2008/04/08/mitt_the_flip_flopper_romney_sinks_republican_party_if_selected_as_john_mccains_vice-president!.thtml
AN ATHEIST NO MORE at 2:47AM on Apr 14th 2008