Obama’s mixed ancestry generates some of the new uncertainty about blackness…

Obama’s mixed ancestry generates some of the new uncertainty about blackness. The white part of his genetic inheritance is not socially hidden, as it often is for “light-skinned blacks” who descend from black women sexually exploited by white slaveholders and other white males. Rather, Obama’s white ancestry is right there in the open, visible in the form of the white woman who, as a single mother, raised Obama after his black father left the family to return to his native Kenya. Press accounts of Obama’s life, as well as Obama’s own autobiographical writings, render Obama’s whiteness hard to miss. No public figure, not even Tiger Woods, has done as much as Obama to make Americans of every education level and social surrounding aware of color-mixing in general and that most of the “black” population of the United States, in particular, are partially white. The “one-drop rule” which denies that color is a two-way street is far from dead, but not since the era of its legal and social consolidation in the early 1920s has the ordinance of this rule been so subject to challenge.

David A. Hollinger, “Obama, The Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Volume 31, Number 4 (2008): 1033-1037. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cal.0.0282.

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