Americans Say Obama’s Not Black? How Pew Got This Wrong |
Americans Say Obama’s Not Black? How Pew Got This Wrong
The Root
2014-04-14
Jenée Desmond-Harris, Senior Staff Writer and White House Correspondent
Saying “Yes, Obama is mixed race” is not the same as saying “No, he’s not black.” Racial Identity 101: You can be both.
Twenty-seven percent of Americans say President Barack Obama is black, while 52 percent say he’s mixed race.
That’s part of a newly published Pew Research Center report that has inspired jarring headlines like these about perceptions of the man commonly (formerly?) known as the first African-American president:
“Is Barack Obama ‘Black’? A Majority of Americans Say No”
“Poll: Majority of Americans Say Obama Is Mixed-Race, Not Black”
The Washington Post calls the data “fascinating.”
But it’s actually not. The only thing fascinating (read: frustrating) is why Pew would force people to choose between these two options. By setting up “black” and “mixed race” as mutually exclusive, as it appears to have done in the “Obama: Black or Mixed Race” (emphasis mine) portion of its poll, it offered Americans a misleading choice that doesn’t reflect their social reality, and certainly doesn’t tell us anything new about how they see their president.
If participants were, in fact, forced to choose between the two options, knowing that Obama self-identifies as black and knowing, too, that he has a white parent and a black parent, it makes sense to assume that many people simply picked the most specific option: “mixed race.”
That does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean they say “no” to his being black…
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Jenée Desmond-Harris, Pew Research Center, The Root