Well said, Hugh!

I by no means subscribe to Mr. Obama’s political views (not that much different from the neocon right), but I for one am happy that a man sits in the White House who is “neither ‘us’ nor ‘them’ but ‘we’”. I did not vote for him, but when he won (as I knew he would) something in me rejoiced that now someone who reconciles both races in his own person sits in the Oval Office. This is something that our race-obsessed nation can’t seem to fathom, still thinking along the color line.

While I don’t like this whole “mixed race” thing — as if race were a valid way to categorize people — it is accepted jargon, unfortunately. How I wish it weren’t.

Obama is neither a white man nor a black man. He is of Euro-American and African heritage. What’s important in terms of his life experience is whether or not he got treated as a black man in white America, which he certainly did. For example, he told a story of how his beloved grandmother admitted that young men who looked like him frightened her. Imagine how that felt. Anyone who imagines that an Ivy League education compensates for that kind of experience has never walked in those shoes.

“We cave in to racist, Victorian understandings of skin colour when we call him “black” as if only his Father has anything to do with his blood and his mother nothing.”

Actually, that particular understanding dates back to a much earlier time; by the Victorian era most people understood that inheritance came from both sides, although they didn’t know how. (Mendel was experimenting with peas in the 19th century, but it took until the 20th for his ideas to be accepted, IIRC.) What we cave in to is the infamous “one drop” rule, which traced ancestry back (several generations, I believe) and got its official start in U.S. law during the Jim Crow era (c. 1890). By those rules (now discredited but kept alive in popular conceptions of race), the president is a black man.

Obama is not white by any measure that has a tradition in this country or any other. You can’t just make this stuff up and think that saying it over and over makes it true.

I don’t think we have to accept Ms. Porter’s “logic” in assessing other people’s races just because she classifies herself as non-white. Her status as — what? — doesn’t give her authority to pronounce on other people anymore than our statuses gives us that authority. In fact, I’d say that her adoption of racist categories makes her as much a part of “the system” (as they called it back in the day) as any white person. “When the revolution comes”? What was she, some burnt-out 60′s leftover?

Can you please elaborate or give references when you talk about scientists differing on ideas of racial markers in the gene code? If someone has found real racial markers, I’m unaware of it and would like to know more.

I prefer your designation of insider/outsider over racial labels, although binaries are always flawed and lacking in nuance. But for the sake of discussion, that sounds closest to a way we can discuss privilege without using racial labels. Although what is known as white skin privilege still stands, as far as most people are concerned. Obama may be an insider, but if he weren’t famous enough to be recognizable and walked into a department store, he’d still be more of a target for increased security surveillance than a white-skinned person, and would still have a harder time than a white guy hailing a cab in NYC. That fact alone, I’m sure, still plays into how he classifies himself. He is a light-skinned black man in this country because he has been treated that way, whatever the genetics say.

It’s fascinating to me that white people’s fear of revolution is rising as we get closer to being a minority in this country. The election of Obama (whatever you want to label him) is a harbinger of things to come, and some white people are getting nervous. Even trying to label Obama as white is an interesting attempt, if perhaps unconscious, to make him one of “us.”

Interestingly, the younger folks I encounter — in their late twenties and younger — seem much more accepting of one another than their elders, and there are fewer who carry this color-based rage and talk about revolution in the 60′s fashion. These days, I hear much more about a revolution in the health care system than about anything else. The angry young (white) man I know who is part of the (tiny) socialist club on my ultra-liberal campus is mostly laughed at sub rosa by his age peers.

Two items from tonight’s TV are pertinent: 1. The Iranian-American scholar Vali Nasr promoting his book on The Daily Show talked about how the thing that will change the Middle Eastern Arab states into allies is the rise of a middle class that links its success to foreign trade. He makes a very good point, in that most people are more interested in making money than in fighting, if they get the chance. This is also true at home: most people would much rather have a nice house and food in the frig than raise their fists and rampage through the streets. 2. Bill Clinton on David Letterman, when asked what is the biggest obstacle to solving global problems such as poverty, war, and disease, pointed to outmoded notions of identity as the biggest thing that needs to be overcome.

Whether we like it or not, we are now a global community. What affects one part of the world affects us all, some way or another. If we (all of us) continue to cling to useless categories of identity we will all suffer; if we can find ways to identify with one another and work together, we will all benefit. It’s up to us.