If Obama is bi-racial….

Frank Jackson, mayor of Cleveland, Ohio

Why is the man in the photo to the left black?

By now, the world knows Barack Obama and his amazing story: the son of a white American and an African from Kenya: raised by his mother and later, his grandparents after the family was abandoned by his father; defying expectations to become the first African-American president of the United States.

But Obama’s ancestry still bothers Americans who can’t wrap their arms around his willingness to embrace a black identity. In Cleveland, for example, a headline in the Plain Dealer, calling Obama an “African American” launched a fusillade of emails and telephone calls to the newspaper’s ombudsman, Ted Diadiun.

” ….lots of people have corrected the term “African-American,” pointing out that, because he had a white mother,  he should be called “biracial.” Diadiun wrote in his weekly column.

Really? Well, then why no complaints or corrections about the racial identity of Cleveland’s mayor?”

Yes, the man in the photo is African-American in the common sense of the word. Mayor Frank Jackson’s mother was Italian and his father was African-American.  Yet most residents of this area describe Jackson as the city’s third black or African-American mayor.

When it comes to race, I joke that the only difference between ordinary African Americans – like me – and folks like Obama and Jackson is that they know the names of their white ancestors.  Still, the controversy over Obama’s racial identity – from both blacks and whites – has me asking:

Just who gets to be black? And who does not?

Mayor Jackson’s upbringing provides a clue. He was born in 1946, when interracial families were rare, and well before “bi-racial” become an accepted category. The family lived in a black neighborhood, so he was immersed in black culture. That’s why Jackson could be considered authentically black, and Obama, a Johnny-come-lately, could not.

But that criteria – having an intimate knowledge of the black experience -  isn’t applied equally.  The same black community who doubted Obama early on, ignored similar circumstances when laying claim to celebrities like Jennifer Beal and Mariah Carey. When it came to them, ancestry trumped experience.

Neither woman had much contact with African Americans while growing up.  Yet, their African American critics charged these women wouldn’t acknowledge their true identity, because they didn’t want to be black.

Does this sound confusing and contradictory?  So is the whole question of racial identity.  Scholars maintain that race is a cultural belief that changes as society transforms.

Former Ohio Congressman Tom Sawyer, voiced that view in 1993. “The thing that we call race and ethnicity is changing in fact and in perception,” he said at hearings that eventually changed the way the United States Census tabulated race.

The 2000 census became the first tabulation allowing Americans to claim more than one racial heritage. The reform was hailed, and criticized, as a step toward rendering the very idea of race obsolete. Yet eight years later, the nation is struggling  with the racial identity of its president-elect.

The definitions created in the South during Reconstruction, are simply too narrow for an America where the last census counted 77 percent of the residents who were “white alone or in combination”; 13 percent who were “African American alone or in combination”; and 12.5 percent who were “Hispanic or Latino (of any race).”

But we haven’t come up with anything better – yet.

So, I’m asking: if the president-elect is bi-racial – as  some blacks and whites insist – why is the man in the photograph black?

Please answer with your comments.

By the way, keep them clean and civil.  Remember you’re not just talking to me.

You’re talking to the world.