Black, by Popular Demand

Even though we are being inundated by it, I still cannot get used to this strange claim that Barack Obama is “black”. Objectively, of course, it’s a nonsensical statement. Ethnically he is fifty percent of what people commonly call “black” and fifty percent of what people commonly call “white”. To call him “black” contains no more intrinsic logic than to call him “white”.

I realize that there is a strange contradiction at work here. On the one hand, it is certainly a wonderful thing that the next U.S. President might be a person whose ethnicity includes a group that has historically been so abused in the U.S.. The statement “a black man is President” conveys a sense of hope to millions of people who always thought that they were automatically slated to receive a raw deal, by virtue of nothing but sheer unreasoning prejudice.

Yet the very idea that somebody who is of mixed parentage is called “black” also works in exactly the opposite way. It’s an echo of the same old trick that the U.S. has been using to harm defenseless people for a century and a half: The ugly notion of “tainted blood”.

There was a time in the U.S., not all that long ago, when somebody could be labeled an “octoroon”. This was a term indicating that one of your great grandparents was of African descent – in other words, that you were one eigth black.

If you had this small amount of African ancestry, then until 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) you were legally considered black, in the sense that white people could exclude you from most respectable accommodations (hotels, train cars, etc), whether or not you could afford to pay for them.

Think about how extraordinary this is: Someone whose entire connection with African ancestry was a single relative who had died before they’d been born – someone who had this one relative whom they had never even met – was nonetheless considered to be of African descent, and therefore unfit to be treated with respect by society.

Seen in this context there is something insidious about reflexively saying that Barack Obama is “black”. It perpetuates the pernicious tendency of our society to label individuals according to whatever component of their ancestry has the lowest perceived status. As though being “white” is some sort of angelic club of purity, from which all outsiders must be excluded. As though the blood of non-whites is somehow tainted.

And what’s bizarre about this is that (as I have said here before) anti-black racism actually has nothing whatsoever to do with people of African ancestry. These sorts of racist ideas are entirely a sickness of “white” people, a deep and horribly disfiguring disease of the psyche, a festering sore upon the soul, a moral incapacity that can cripple and deform the hearts of otherwise decent people, rendering them incapable of feeling for others with the full empathy which one human is capable of feeling for another.

I suppose on one level we should all pity “white” people who feel the need to identify Barack Obama merely as “black”. By clinging to such an absurdly reductionist label, they are publicly declaring themselves to be crippled in an essential way.

I for one welcome an ethnically mixed president. Perhaps his presence in the White House will help these poor damaged racists to heal. Maybe an Obama presidency will help people who have felt a reflexive need to label anyone not like themselves in an insidiously pejorative way. Perhaps these self-shackled souls will finally be made free, and will at last become ready to take their rightful place as proud members of this glorious human race.