CNN Latest News: Is Obama black or biracial?

[wtmusic]

More newsworthy than the president being impeached! :banghead:

"The 2000 U.S. Census was the first time Americans were allowed to identify themselves as "multiracial," and more than six million people checked more than one box in the race and ethnicity category.

Barack Obama's father was from Kenya; his white mother was from Kansas.

Included in the multiracial category is the Democratic presumptive nominee, Sen. Barack Obama. With a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, Obama is the nation's first biracial candidate for president. The media, however, have continually called Obama the nation's first major party "black candidate," saying he could make history as the first "black president." But is that accurate?"

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/09/btsc.obama.race/index.html

[malaise]

1. Simple answer

Duh!!! to the assholes at CNN.

[uppityperson]

25. Human. eom

[clydefrand]

2. They need to clarify this so that those who are racist will be

likely to vote for him if he's half white. I heard an email this evening on Wolfie's show from someone who wanted to know why Obama didn't talk up his white heritage.

[sandnsea]

6. It's offensive to me

Why the hell should he have to talk up his white heritage to be accepted. It's gross.

[malaise]

8. On the other hand, why should he deny any of his ethnicities

That's just as gross. The racist establishment should stop trying to define people.

[sandnsea]

12. He talks about his mother and grandparents all the time

He's perfectly comfortable with who he is and isn't denying anything. Actually, I'd just as soon we stop talking about his ethnicity in color terms altogether. He's got a vibrant background with pieces from African, Hawaiian, Indonesian, and US Plains cultures. That's enough for me.

[malaise]

13. I agree with you

It's M$M that's pissing me off.

[aquart]

19. Well, some of us are damn proud of being multi-racial.

And I put it on every form that allows me to enter it.

[sandnsea]

24. Well you be sure and talk up the white part

because that's what the post I responded to said.

[Electric Flag]

36. Why would you be proud about something over which you had no influence?

It sounds as weird as if I were to say I'm proud to be white. :shrug:

[sandnsea]

38. I'm proud of my heritage

I don't see anything wrong with being proud of your heritage, whether it's African, Japanese, French, or Anglo-Saxon. I just don't think you should have to "talk up" your whiteness in order to appease a bunch of ignorant racists.

[mac2]

48. Tiger Woods claims to be white, black, and Asian

not just "black".

[sandnsea]

65. And so does Barack Obama, your point? n/t

[mac2]

45. If we count every vote or recount according to their state

laws we win every time. They can't win so they steal it.

[LaPera]

34. I agree!

[EFerrari]

11. LOL!

:rofl:

[bemildred]

3. It's not either/or dimwit. He can be both.

Don't these fools know ANYTHING about US history or genetics?
:banghead::banghead:

[postulater]

4. They should check with Colbert

[Jack Rabbit]

5. What? No missing blond teenagers tonight?

No news about Parislindsaymiley?

[OwnedByFerrets]

7. FUCNN...is that clear enough for ya?

[Cleita]

9. He's of mixed heritage or mixed ethnicity, however, you want it.

Apparently, the geneticists have discovered there are no genes for race just genes for variations within the one race that is humanity.

[EFerrari]

14. Obama is a self identified black man. That should be enough for anyone. n/t

[shanti]

15. EXACTLY!

SELF-IDENTIFIED - that is the key. it's really nobody's business but his own. of course, he's biracial, but america doesn't see that. he's a black man.

[mac2]

17. Under the old pre-Civil War laws he would be declared

as black. Under modern law he is biracial (his mother white and his father black). I don't care what he calls himself that's what he is under the law. Neither race should want to take it all for themselves.

[goclark]

66. Some Americans are still stuck on stupid on this issue

If you look Black you must be Black.

If your Mother is Black or your father is Black you are Black.

Yes, Obama is biracial ~ and will that make them like him more? less?


1/2 way down the page you will find a list of Presidents that some believe to have been Black.
Don't flame me, flame the authors please. :patriot:

http://www.heptune.com/preslist.html#Families

African-American Presidents
Note: Several presidents were allegedly of mixed European and African ancestry, which by U.S. reckoning would designate them as African-American. See The Five Negro Presidents by J.A. Rogers and Six Black Presidents: Black Blood, White Masks by Auset Bakhufu.

Thomas Jefferson
Andrew Jackson
Abraham Lincoln
Warren Harding
Dwight Eisenhower

Now let's just assume for one strange minute that the 5 listed above really were biracial.
What difference would it make to you... :shrug:

[aquart]

23. "Self-identified." Certainly.

And nobody here feels the slightest bit ripped off that the first black president will have a KENYAN heritage and not one ancestor that came on a slave ship? Black Americans arrived here over 400 years ago in the worst possible way and went on to alter and affect every area of American life. And NONE of that experience is Obama's.

We'll elect a black all right. But only one whose ancestors weren't here. The ones whose families made the journey and fought every day for four hundred years to survive and flourish in this hostile land, they still get to wait for the honor.

[MS Liberal]

28. He is not African-American; he is bi-racial.

[shanti]

30. yes

if you want to get down to the nitty gritty, but do you REALLY think he's calling himself biracial? come on. my biracial son also self-identifies as black, i have no problem with it (and i'm his white mother). if you've never experienced it, you just have no idea....or as bob marley said, "who feels it, knows it". bob saw himself as a black man too.

[provis99]

39. well, virtually all "African-Americans" are part white

thanks to slavery days. Its perfectly as accurate to call Obama an African-American as it is to call any other "black" person in the United States.

[mac2]

47. If people know they are part white they should claim they are

biracial. It's not perfectly right to call yourself a "black" person since the Civil War and segregation. You should be proud of your heritage be it any race.

Many American Indians are biracial too.

[ecstatic]

57. I don't think you understand

Most of the white ancestry that many blacks in this country have are the result of RAPES during slavery.

[goclark]

79. And that is not the case with Obama

I am African American.

All my family and all my friends from Maryland were African American.
We were a segregated society then.

Just on my mother's side of the family:

My mother is what African Americans, born in the early 1900's, would describe as "high yellow with good hair."

Her mother was deep chocolate brown with hair that needed to be "pressed and curled with hot irons."

Her father was the closest thing I've seen to any White person, wavy light brown hair and big blue eyes. His Mother was the daughter of an indentured servant from England( born in VA) and his father was from Maryland. His father's family was Free in 1810.

When this little chocolate drop grandchild would walk downtown with him, White people would stop him and say, "Is that your maid's child?"

"She is adorable."

He would always look right at them and say, "I am proud to say I am a Negro, this is my beautiful grandchild."

"Good day."

I remember it vividly.

I respected my grandfather so much for letting people know who he was and how proud he was to have me as his grandchild.

Yes, African Americans are a blend and most can trace their roots in someway to White.

That's what makes this world so crazy to me, this is the 21st Century, it time for a CHANGE. :patriot:

[calmblueocean]

33. Obama's experienced the legacy of slavery in his everyday life

... just the same as any black man in America, whether his parents came from Kenya or not.

[mac2]

49. So have many women in our society.

They still rank below a black male in pay and society.

[Dogtown]

59. Divisionistic and deceptive rhetoric

If the deep south had not been forced to accept integration, Mr. Obama would be relegated to the back of their buses.

Don't keep trying to stir up the manufactured and largely imaginary divisiveness in our party. All progressives will rally behind this (black) man despite the slurs, innuendo and complete lies purveyed by the media and other dominionist operatives.

[Carnea]

51. The fact Obama's kin were slave owners

and not slaves puts him in the company of a lot of American Presidents. We should not judge the man for the sins of his father.

If he wants to self identify with African Slave descendent's that is his prerogative.

There are more important things than this. It is a tool to distract us from real issues.

I really have high hopes for him. I think he will in many ways save this country. I really think certain sour grapes types who worry about his genealogy.

With current Immigrants from Africa excelling in all areas of American life the West African slave decedent wing of the African American experience are showing some understandable bitterness.

[Cleita]

77. His children though do have ancestors that came over on a slave ship. n/t

[Cleita]

60. Not really.

He can't claim one and deny the other any more than you and I can deny our mixed heritages. To do so is dishonest and disingenuous.

[EFerrari]

61. It's not a matter of honesty. Obama's lineage is well known.

It's a matter of self identification in a field of social constructs. Being "black" in America doesn't preclude mixed bloodedness or European DNA.

Have you seen Henry Louis Gates on this? He put together a wonderful project where well known black personalities gave a swab of their DNA and Gates tried to track down their ancestors. The stories were amazing and so were the results. :)

http://www.africandna.com/about.aspx

[Cleita]

68. Interesting. Thanks!

Ultimately, our species came out of Africa, or so the anthropologists theorize, so we are all African Americans from the beginning.

[EFerrari]

69. That's right.

:)

[Cleita]

70. I think though it makes my original position that race is

a false construct, true. We are all one race with various genetic variations in play that have been blended and sifted for millenium. In that way each one of us is unique within that one race and can't be pigeonholed into racial categories.

[EFerrari]

71. Of course. But DNA and what our own culture does with the

idea of "race" (cultural practice) and how an individual identifies are different realms that get jumbled up, no?

I'm "Heinz 57", look like a European with a fading tan so others approach me as a "white" person, and I identify as a Latina.

[Cleita]

75. Me too, but I identify with both.

No one thinks I'm Latina but I identify very much with my culture particularly since I spent a good part of my childhood and teen years in the country of my birth, Chile. Yet, I can't deny the other half of my family who look very much like their blond northern european ancestors and are one hundred percent working class Americans, who serve their country proudly in the military and who live to work unlike my Latino relatives who work to live and would never serve in the miltary unless they had no options. However, I think one of the reasons Obama was so successful and could cross the so-called race barrier that other AA's couldn't was because he can identify with white Americans as well as Black Americans, although I still think race is an artificial construct. Ethnicity on the other hand isn't. When I was a kid and when I wasn't going to school in Chile, I was going to school here in the USA. At the time there were a flood of eastern Europeans displaced people immigrating here right after WWII. I came to know after awhile all the ethnic hatreds there between Polish, Germans, Yugoslavians and many others that go back to tribalism in the Bronze Age. Never mind everyone was Aryan white and mostly Catholic, a fact that made it hard for me to understand at first. The family of one of my classmates, a Slovenian, would travel across town to a Mexican majority parish rather than go to the same Church as the Polish families. The Poles wouldn't go to the same Church as the Germans. My Slovenian classmate, who remained my friend up until we were adults and she got married and moved away, and I had many conversations about these prejudices and where they came from. It turns out it's cultural mostly but blamed on race. I always laughed when white people considered themselves a different race than other white people, but the fact is the prejudices are there and have no scientific basis, but when you dig into the history of the tribalism that undercuts all of us, then it starts to make sense. Sorry, if this rambles but I wasn't expecting to write an essay, but this is the jist of what I believe is wrong with us and what makes us bigots. We do have to change and overcome these fears and prejudices if we are ever to have peace in this country and on this planet. I hope Obama uses the advantage that he has as being of both cultures and starts to build a bridge between all the factions bringing them together. To do that he has to embrace his ethnic "white" side as well as his ethnic "black" side.

[Doityourself]

72. Mainstream will identify him as a black man first, so he may as well self-identify with it..

[EFerrari]

73. Obama seems to have, as usual, made his own decision.

One of the things I like about him is his habit of self determination. :)

[LeftyMom]

10. Everybody's "multiracial"

And then if you go far enough back, we're all African.

People who fussed about the details of the last few generations of the man's ancestry must have no sense of perspective on human history.

[mac2]

18. I'm not sure if that has been proven.

I know regardless of color our genes are pretty similar to the 98% level.

[LeftyMom]

21. Well, nothing's really "proven" but it's a reliable theory that fits the genetic and

physical evidence available about our ancestry and origins.

[NCDem60]

27. That's a horrible and blatantly racist thing to

say. Chimpanzee and human genes are 99 percent similar!!

http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Hardison4-2007.htm

But I know what you meant. :)

[meow2u3]

41. It's the other 1% that separates humans from Bush!

:evilgrin:

[mac2]

43. Good one.

He has a genetic problem with his heart beat being so low. I wonder if it beats at all sometimes.

[papapi]

16. Although I know it's not, this should be such a non issue. We should be......

...electing the person who is best qualified, has the most logical plan, and stands on merit. Race should not be the issue. But, unfortunately, this is The United States of America where bigotry and hate hold sway. Our current subministration hasn't helped the situation. Fear and hate mongers turn people against each other. The neo-con oligarchy must be rooted out and destroyed.

[mac2]

20. Some use it as a divisive issue or even for their own

advancement. If they gave away scholarships or affirmative action for purple people, they would step forward to claim it.

To say our society should be color blind is naive. A couple more generations might prove that to be so. To be "one" as a country makes us have more in common rather than color. Similar language also helps to unite us.

[Bozita]

22. It's good to see CNN steering this election toward the really important shit

economy
Iraq
jobs
healthcare
inflation
oil prices
foreclosures

All small shit.

We want to know about Obama's genes.

[redstate_democrat]

26. These people are ridiculous.

It's almost as if they just can't fully accept him if he identifies with black people in anyway. It's quite obvious. If he were white and identified as white, then a lot more people would be more receptive to him. Some white people really have a problem with the fact he identifies as black, has a black wife, and has black kids.

Get over it.

[GreenTea]

29. If he's black, then he's also white-He's Bi-Racial-Skin color only means something to racist repukes

and moderates!

[shanti]

31. genetically, yes

but culturally...he's a black man.

[GreenTea]

32. Curiously, how do you define that....what markers.....wealth, cultural leanings,

looks, speech, color, media, ideology? Sounds like a bit of reverse bigotry to me.....

He's a man. And we're all jazzed to be able to vote for any insightful, eloquent, caring, democratic man (or woman) as our candidate!

[mac2]

44. Legally not anything else.

[shanti]

56. again

he's self-defined. it seems you have a problem with that...oh well.

[Monk06]

35. By definition that is a racist question n/t

[and-justice-for-all]

37. Obama is the Democractic Nominee for U.S. President!...nt

[Donald Ian Rankin]

40. Yes. NT

[Eurobabe]

42. Why is this news?

I mean really. Who cares?

[Echo In Light]

46. Exactly

[EFerrari]

74. All kinds of people care for all kinds of reasons.

This country is going to keep having this conversation for the rest of the year, and most likely (hopefully) for the years Obama is in office. That's only natural.

The corporate media will put this stuff up for their own reasons but the people are interested in the issue of "race" in America and they'll continue to talk about it. We might as well get used to it and figure out how to make it a net positive.

[underpants]

50. DC MSM is just trying to let white people it is okay not to vote for Obama

and making sure it sticks so when those numbers pop out of the diebold machines people will say "Eh I could se that"

[warren pease]

52. He's fucking green. Can we move on now? Assholes... n/t

[bdamomma]

53. crap, like they don't other things to focus on.

[KharmaTrain]

54. Today's New Obama Rumor...

...someone told me she heard from a friend who heard it from a friend that Barack Obama has fathered two black children!!!!

:rofl:

[cushla_machree]

55. I would say he is the first african american president

He can call himself biracial if he wants, This is a non-issue for me.

But really, how many african americans DON'T have white heritage mixed in? Black americans look different than black africans.

I don't know what it is like to be biracial, but I suspect when you look more black than white, thats what you identify with. I look more Irish then German, and i identify with being Irish more. I am sure obama feels what he feels, and thats fine with me. I think it is sad that some people would be more inclined to vote for him because his mother is white. i wonder if the media will play that up. Race as usual in america.....

[newfie11]

58. Who cares!!

Why does that make a difference? Why can't he just be a man running for office. Why does the stupid comments on skin color issue come up.

[KansDem]

62. Self delete

[Dukkha]

63. still doing a 'solid job' reporting over there

NOT!

[klyon]

64. interesting point ... one drop of negro blood makes you black

that has always been our standard
pretty silly

[Cleita]

76. I think it's deeply racist and stems back to our slaveholding past where

the white slave holders who impregnated their African slaves wouldn't accept their offspring as full heirs although they might acknowledge paternity.
There was no way that half slave kid was going to be a member of the family. I have know African Americans of mixed heritage who were whiter than me, whiter skin, light hair and blue eyes, but if they admitted their ethnicity, they were classified as black.

[spanone]

67. here's my answer...who gives a shit?

[Blue Belle]

78. Didn't the Human Race start in Africa anyway?

Aren't we all African descendants?