And it has been damaging to have Barack Obama, a black man speaking from the authoritative platform of the presidency, reinforce the widely held belief that racial inequality in the United States is, in large measure, the direct responsibility of black folk.

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

Achin surveyed hundreds of biracial adolescents through MySpace and Facebook, personal connections, and random interviews, asking probing personal questions of how they viewed themselves. She found that their responses clustered into five categories of identity: “Monoracials,” who defined themselves predominantly by a primary peer group; “Bidentifiers,” who identify confidently with more than one racial identity; “Sliders,” who were able to identify with whatever group in which they found themselves; “Raceless,” who refused to identify with any race, but prefer race-neutral descriptors such as “American”; and “Partial People,” who identify themselves as half a person, mostly as half-white, rarely as half-black.

Sally Holm, “CAMD Scholars Take On Variety of Complex Racial Issues in MLK Jr. Day Presentations,” Phillips Academy News, January 28, 2008.

And it has been damaging to have Barack Obama, a black man speaking from the authoritative platform of the presidency, reinforce the widely held belief that racial inequality in the United States is, in large measure, the direct responsibility of black folk.

I worried that it was possible for the symbolic and inspirational aspects of having a black president more than offset by the damages that could be done by the messages delivered by a black president. And it has been damaging to have Barack Obama, a black man speaking from the authoritative platform of the presidency, reinforce the widely held belief that racial inequality in the United States is, in large measure, the direct responsibility of black folk. This has been the deal breaker for me: not merely a silence on white physical and emotional violence directed against black Americans, but the denial of the centrality of American racism in explaining sustained black-white disparity.

William A. Darity, “How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans,” The Atlantic, December 22, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/how-barack-obama-failed-black-americans/511358/.

Tags: The Atlantic, William A. Darity, William Darity

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Mixed Race Studies

And it has been damaging to have Barack Obama, a black man speaking from the authoritative platform of the presidency, reinforce the widely held belief that racial inequality in the United States is, in large measure, the direct responsibility of black folk.

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