Barack Obama's rise marks America's first multiracial decade

Mon Dec 7

Everyone has a day of awakening when it comes to race. For me, it was a cool September day when I was eight years old. My family had recently moved to Colorado from Tennessee and like any child starting a new school, I was nervous. In the administrator’s office, my mother and I waited to go over my files. Nearby was another family—a white mother and a black father with their son and daughter. They were also arriving for their first day and the boy was around my age.

To my surprise, my mother turned to me and quietly told me she was worried for the children. We were living in a predominantly white suburb and she later explained to me that being black in our society was hard enough, but being half black, half white, was even harder. There was greater potential for rejection from both sides of the racial divide. Because of this, she wondered if entering a black-white relationship was always fair to the kids. In some ways, I understood my mother's reservations, but I was also astonished. The simple reason why is because I’m biracial too, half Asian and half white.

That was more than 25 years ago. Today, the multiracial American has become an undeniable fact of life in the 21st century. From the actress Jessica Alba to the trend-scriber Malcolm Gladwell to the Olympic champion Apolo Anton Ohno, many multiracial Americans have reached superstar status in the last decade. And the biggest phenomenon of them all is President Barack Obama.

This isn’t a new story. Cherokee chief John Ross, who led his people through the “Trail of Tears” tragedy in 1838, was mostly of Scottish ancestry. The abolitionist Frederick Douglass is believed to have been the son of a white slave owner. Lynda Carter of "Wonder Woman" fame, is half Mexican American.

But during this decade the multiracial American has become a triumphant archetype of sorts, like the rugged cowboy, Rosie the Riveter or the European immigrant arriving at Ellis Island. Behind this successful evolution lies the civil rights movement and a shadow struggle by millions of interracial families. But equally at play within the psychological and political landscape has been a dynamic of racial mathematics, a sometimes perilous game of addition and subtraction that simultaneously enlightens and obscures our search for a common American identity.

Identity equations and the paradox of race

Barack Obama made his own calculation when he decided to run for the presidency: Was America ready to vote a multiracial black man into the White House? Many thought he was naïve. Others were outraged by the very idea. When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy threatened to sink his campaign, Obama spoke directly to these tensions. As David Plouffe recounts in his book, "The Audacity to Win," the tangled history of race was something Obama had thought about deeply for 30 years.

“It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate,” Obama said in his race speech on March 18, 2008. “But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.”

The president’s social equation almost sounds too good to be true. But for me, Obama’s proclamation is a no-brainer. As a biracial person, practically from birth, you can carry an almost biological instinct about humanity’s ability to transcend race. Not to do so, I believe, would be to deny your own existence. But being biracial can also feel like living in a border town, where a fault line runs between sometimes troubled histories and competing loyalties.

When you pivot on that tension, like Obama did in his speech, that identity limns the paradox of race itself. At its worst, that paradox divides us. At its best, it can challenge the imagination to dig deeper for common cause.

“I think that President Obama has been trying, with really remarkable skill, to get Americans to begin to think of the United States as a fundamentally multiracial society,” historian Peggy Pascoe says. “And that strikes me as a really important move, partly because it will help dismantle the long history of white supremacy in the United States but also because it will help the United States fit more comfortably in the global world and the 21st century.”

Pascoe, author of "What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America," credits the 1967 Supreme Court decision of Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriages, and a multiracial movement started by interracial parents in the '70s, for helping set the stage for Obama. Jenifer Bratter, a sociologist at Rice University, who studies interracial trends, agrees both were key to this decade's mutliracial gains.

“You have this opportunity across the nation for individuals to meet and to marry and to not just have these relationships but to have them publicly sanctioned and publicly recognized,” Bratter says. “That’s the context through which children, a multiracial identity emerges.”

Racial mathematics vs. racial atheism

The start of this decade was the first time Obama and other people's multiracial identities could be officially recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau. With the 2010 Census, the U.S. government will take its second snapshot of one of the fastest growing trends in the U.S. population: interracial marriages and mixed race citizens. In the 2000 survey, about 6.8 million Americans self-identified as belonging to two or more racial categories.

Nicholas Jones, Chief of Racial Statistics, at the U.S. Census Bureau, says multiracial babies are one of the fastest growing groups in the country and based on factors like birth estimates, he expects that number to go up by a fair margin in the 2010 Census. That will be the first time that a set of multiracial statistics will be consistent enough with a previous Census for meaningful comparisons.

For many activists and scholars, racial statistics still present a quandary of sorts. Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon, who is multiracial herself and has written extensively on multiracial issues, acknowledges the 2000 and 2010 Census changes as a key advance. But she also argues for a stand-alone multiracial category and the eventual abolition of “race” itself. She argues that race is not a biological category but a concept, something that the Census acknowledges in its own briefs.

“What I’m suggesting is instead of leaving it blank that there might be an option for no racial affiliation, a kind of atheism of race,” Zack says. “I think that’s the rational conclusion."

But Zack, author of "Ethics for Disaster" and "Thinking About Race," isn't saying that we're ready to live in a colorblind society. For example, she challenges the idea that Obama could have been elected if he had insisted on being accepted as a multiracial American versus an African-American of mixed ancestry. “Had he been more black, more visibly black and not had any immediate white ancestry, a number of whites might not have found him acceptable on racial grounds,” she notes. “But suppose he was more white in appearance and had known black ancestry, that might not have helped him either. He’s right on the edge of something that is very socially and culturally viable.”

A multiracial worldview in action

In the '80s and '90s, being multiracial was still seen as something curious or exotic. But in this decade, I've been struck by just how commonplace it's become, whether in our media or when you walk down city streets. Americans also have more diverse friendships and co-workers now. Obama's rise has brought all these shifts into laser focus.

As with any minority hero, the American public needs to evaluate President Obama on the merits of his performance, not his race. Voters expect him to fix two wars and a cratered economy. Over time, the novelty of his presidency will wear off. That’s progress too.

“The interesting thing about Obama, I don’t think his racial identity is what makes him,” Zack says. “This is someone who is charismatic, who has a number of skills. I think he's saying the truth when he says he wants to downplay race because I don't think the way he sees the world is related to his racial identity.”

That’s not to say that everything is well in the land. Obama’s race has also sparked some old prejudices, and separating bigotry from genuine criticism will continue to be a challenge. Pascoe, Bratter and Zack all emphasize the continued institutional racism that plagues the nation, especially black urban populations, from decaying schools to high incarceration rates. Black men are being especially hard hit by the hobbling job market.

"Things have changed enormously since the 1960s and I don't want to minimize that change," Pascoe says. "But I dont want to be too rosy-eyed about the notion that we may be headed for a colorblind utopia. I don't see anything like that anytime soon."

Wide awake in a new frontier

I talked to one last person for this piece, my Japanese-American mother. She and my father now live in Hawaii, her home state. I asked her about that cold September morning a generation ago in Colorado. She remembers it slightly differently and had a decidedly more adult point of view. She has experienced racism many times and has talked to other interracial couples over the years.

“We would get stares sometimes when we went out to eat or strangers wouldn’t believe I was your mother,” she explains. “I met a white woman from Texas once who was married to a black man, and she told me that most of her white family had rejected her children, wanting nothing to do with them.” I asked her about what she had meant when she cautioned against the idea of interracial marriages. “Children can be cruel and society especially. What I was saying is those parents must be very brave. I also was saying that you have to give those children extraordinary love, you have to support them.”

Not surprisingly, she voted for Obama, and cried when he won. For me, as a biracial American, it was a profound experience watching him climb to the planet’s most powerful leadership role. He’s now a global American icon. I’m not sure interracial parents have to be as brave as before. And that's a good thing. But the nation as a whole still needs to be.

I’ve thought a lot about that boy 25 years ago in that school. Whoever he is today, he must have felt a special pride on inauguration day. Who could have blamed him? He was not alone.

— Thomas Kelley