He’s a Dutchman. He was my Frisian conversation partner in El Salvador. He lives in Japan. Recently he said: “My students say Obama is not Black, but mixed, and they are trying to come up with the right English term for his color. The closest English term to the equivalent Japanese word is ‘Negroid.’ I suppose I shall have to go to Brazil, where there are mixed people, to discover the correct color term for Obama.” What I said:
“Part A (why is Obama considered Black?). Because the U.S. had a white vs. black segregation system, as opposed to the three tiered one in place in Louisiana (before it became American), parts of the Caribbean, and Brazil. Mixed people were included in the Black category which essentially meant ‘not white.’ That being the case, a whole culture arose within that community, about which there is a great deal to say. By now most members of it are mixed to one degree or another, after 4-500 years on these mixed continents. Barack Obama is in that culture. At the same time he is not actually the child of African-American parents. His parents’ roots are somewhat different, which is why he might also consider himself ‘biracial.’
“It is worth noting that Black or African-American IS ALREADY a mixed category – mixed among different African countries, nationalities, and so on, and between African, European, and New World cultures – and that most African Americans are mixed ‘racially’ as well. The idea of either ‘blackness’ or ‘whiteness’ being pure categories just doesn’t work if you think in historical terms.
“Part B (on coming up with just the right word to describe Obama or his color). The creation of that kind of terminology has been a racist project for centuries, and it is not amusing.
“Part C (on going to Brazil to find out what the exact term for Obama’s mixture might be, or to find out the truth about Obama’s mixture). His identity is a U.S. one, so the place to look for it is this cultural and political context. All of these terms are historically and culturally bound, and all of these classification systems are artificial. The same ‘look’ will be classified differently in different places, and people tend to identify in ways that fit their historical realities.
“That’s how I’d answer the question if it came up in a class.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Great answer! On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder what (other than a binary racialist world-system) would engage people so readily, so thoroughly and so at length with this topic. It’s skin tone, for goodness’ sake! Which is obviously a socially-constructed categorization in the first place. I’ve started asking folks if it’s really necessary/important/appropriate to KEEP looking for ways to refer to Barack Obama as the Black man who happened to be elected U.S. President rather than “the 44th President of the United States” [period]?
Merci! I was really p.o.’d at the Dutchman, and it took about 3 drafts to get this civil. It is true, the obsession with the mixture bespeaks the binary racialist word system. Also the Dutchman seems to be fixated on the interracial sex which took place to produce Barack Obama. He seems to think that if THAT happened – O Taboo – then racism is over, or something along these lines.
Anyway, here’s another piece of the exchange – what do you think, am I too mean? It follows, after the line.
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I heard back that in Europe and Asia English was spoken, and that I as a North American only spoke a dialect of it, and that the time of North American hegemony over what English words meant was over. My friend further said that his student, who wanted to call Obama mulatto or “Negroid” but not African-American or Black, had the right to do so because he was the father of mixed race children, “so he had understood Mendel correctly.”
I SAID BACK:
The African diaspora is broad and varied, as is the English language (historically a pidgin language, as I am sure you know). Yes, I speak American English but I am an educated person and read books by English speakers from many countries; I have cousins in London and Nairobi, native English speakers all; many people are Indian and they speak native English; English is spoken on several Caribbean islands and it is so different that it is hard for me to understand but it is English and it is native English. Until recently I was living with a man from the UK who enjoyed claiming that only he actually spoke English. This chauvinism was amusing in a pathetic way because his was not the King’s English. My Anglophile father pointed out that his aunt, a lecturer at Cambridge University, would have split a gut laughing at this fellow’s pretensions.
I would say that you also speak virtually native English but that you project a number of superficial European stereotypes into the broad world of the Americas, understanding “the Americas” in the Hemispheric sense (which includes dozens of countries). From the perspective of these varied continents, Europe is provincial. Yes, HENRY JAMES’ New England characters were country bumpkins in France, but I am speaking of the America of James’ contemporary JOSE MARTI which is much broader.
“Race” is not a scientific but a cultural term and racial meanings are embedded in historical, cultural and political discourses (the bibliography on this matter is enormous). In Britain, for instance, the informal term “black” includes Indians and Pakistanis, who are “Asian” (but not “East Asian”) in current U.S. discourse. In the United States Black connotes cultural pride and “mulatto” is an outmoded and generally racist term. In Brazil the same term is less negative but people tend to describe themselves in terms of colors and not percentages of racial mixture. Conservative whites in Brazil prefer that Afro-Brazilians not call themselves Black because it is a term of political and cultural resistance to the still dominant discourse of “whitening.”
In Louisiana there is the term “mixed Creole” which designates a racial mixture but also a culture that speaks French. Most mixed Creoles also identify as Black or African-American and consider themselves to be part of the broader diaspora as well as part of the local French-based culture. Some mixed Creoles (like my youngest brother) like to say they are not Black and this has to do, among other things, with not wanting to be associated with the poor, but most importantly, with resistance to the dominant English-speaking culture. Others do identify as Black (as well as Creole) in part because they have been oppressed as such and therefore resist as such. I repeat: in all of these contexts, Blackness is a cultural and political identification, not a specific color.
It is fine for people in Japan or anywhere to notice that Obama, or anyone, is not of 100% African descent. It’s a fine game to try to come up with an English term which would at least theoretically parallel a Japanese one. But to know a language also means to know what its words mean in the cultural history of the places in which it is spoken. You may speak English any way you want to, but to dream up your own private history of the African diaspora, which is what I perceive you and your students to be doing, is pure solipsism. And to impose one’s own cultural categories elsewhere is colonialist as well as unscientific, and it is terribly provincial. At the university we fail people who do this because they are not intellectually serious.
Students of English who intend to speak the language with people from English speaking countries deserve to know that we would not say “negroid” commonly here. We would not stand up and declare that Barack Obama was not Black or African-American, but “negroid.” We would not do so because of the racism and racist history that inheres in the term. If your students do it they may find that their business deals go cold. You are not being responsible to them if you do not let them know that.
It’s fine to notice that “races” are named differently in different places, and to notice the particular irrationality of the systems of classification that have developed historically in the United States or anywhere, but not to realize how irrational all of these systems are is NOT SCIENCE. And to try to teach languages without cultural and historical contexts is also NOT SCIENCE.
Any geneticist can explain to you that while Mendel’s theories may work for plants, Mendelian pseudoscience was used decades ago to create theories of “whitening” and to justify segregation. These theories have been discredited and abandoned for some time now. And having biracial children does not make anyone an authority on race. Thomas Jefferson had biracial children, for Heaven’s sake.
Some of my ancestors owned Frederick Douglass until he escaped, and he was biracial. He was biracial but he was also a Black revolutionary. He worked tirelessly to free his people and they were of many shades. My ancestors, who were irritated when he got away from them, called him “mulatto” but I am glad he got away from them and grateful for the work he undertook to improve the country, work from which we all benefit today. I choose not to impose terminology I might dream up as “accurate” on him, or his, or anyone. That is a political choice but it is also an ethical one. It is, in addition, a choice in favor of intellectual integrity over dilettantism.
This comment deserves its own post!
🙂 Grazie. It has been published by an alter ego! I’ve put that site in transition but I think you know which one it is.
P.S. Following I will paste in my second mail on this matter. I was so blind with rage when I wrote both that I do not know how they sound – I felt as though I were smashing the Dutchman’s head into the wall, although looking at the mails coldly and impartially, they are not too bad. Hvad siger I (as we would say in Danish – what say ye)?
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Sorry to be so insistent on this but if you and the students want it to be an academic matter then you want to look at history. Is Obama’s color really black? Is anyone’s? Not literally. Is he of 100% African ancestry? No, but almost no person of African descent in this hemisphere is.
It may seem clever and original in Japan to notice that Obama is mixed, but anyone this side of the Pacific, north or south, would say yes, and so what is new, did you only figure that out now? Moderately educated Europeans announce obvious facts like this as new discoveries to Americans all the time: did you know that Black people in your country were mixed? Did you know that there was a French Revolution? Did you know that the invasion of Viet Nam was illegal? etc. etc. and it is very irritating. (I could retort, did you know that your guest workers are discriminated against? Did you know your country participated actively in the slave trade? Well, DUH, I expect you do, and I cannot imagine why I might engage in such a line of questioning out of the blue. Yet I get this kind of c*** from Europeans all the time.)
If people are learning English for purposes of actually using it they then may want to know what words actually mean and have meant. People may create neologisms in English to correspond to Japanese concepts, but those remain Japanese concepts, not U.S. ones, or British ones, or Indian ones, or African ones, or whatever.
To tell a person who identifies as Black that they are not “really Black” in your opinion, is really insulting in many quarters and for good reason. Your students deserve to know that in case they ever speak English outside the classroom.
Otherwise, as I say, to notice that he is mixed is like discovering that there is a sun. Yes, and … ? And as I said in my other mail, he might be Black or not in Brazil, depending on the politics of the person saying it, because those categories work differently there. Here he’s Black, for various reasons, although there is of course a lot else to say and that is said about his mixture and the meanings it produces.
Once again: race itself and racial terminologies mean differently in different places and I realize it is hard to understand that people in another area, for historical reasons, have a system of categories that works differently than yours. But *all* of these systems of categories are historical products, there is NOT one that is “purely academic” or “absolute” because race itself is a socially constructed category and not a biological fact.
Para finalizar, a couple of points from Antiracism 101 and which apply to all countries, and that I touched on before:
1. Mendel’s theories were used to create Eugenics which has been used for many nefarious purposes including sending people with bloodlines like mine to the ovens.
2. It is perfectly easy to have love, sex and children inter-racially in a racist context and while remaining racist. Saying, “I had sex with a Black person so I could not do anything racist” is like saying “My great great grandmother was Black and so I could not do anything racist.” These and similar statements are strategies of denial, and they are not true statements.
It is TRUE that MOST (although certainly *not* by any means ‘all’) of the people who are born to two (2) parents who are both members of the
very specific and unique Ethnic grouping that is currently being referred to
by the term of ‘African-American’ (AA) are, in fact, Mixed-Race….
Soaptalk — ‘African-American’ and ‘Black’ are themselves mixed categories. Read your history. –Z