Mixed Race Studies

After the first black president, who will be second?

The Washington Post
2013-01-20

Vanessa Williams

President Obama’s historic election in 2008 and his reelection last year proved decisively that race is no longer an insurmountable hurdle to high political office in the United States.

But the current pool of possible candidates suggests that the next black president will not be taking the oath of office anytime soon.

“In the shadow of Barack Obama, there’s not been a lot of growth,” Cornell Belcher, a pollster who was involved in the president’s 2008 campaign, said. “It is really hard for minorities to get elected at the statewide level, and before you start talking about president, frankly, you have to get elected to statewide office.”

The notion of a post-Obama reformation of black politics has not been borne out at the ballot box, as black politicians continue to struggle to win the statewide offices that are the traditional paths to the presidency.

While the election of the first black president marked a significant break from the country’s history of racial prejudice, race still matters: The vast majority of black elected officials are put into office by black voters. Even Obama needed large numbers of black and Latino votes to win, particularly last year, when a majority of whites voters voted for someone else…

Read the entire article here.

In short and simple ceremony, Obama starts his second term

The Los Angeles Times
2013-01-20

Kathleen Hennessey

WASHINGTON — With a quick and simple swearing-in ceremony at the White House, President Obama formally ended his first term in office Sunday and embarked on another four years leading a nation hobbled by a weak economy and gripped by political division.
 
Raising his right hand a few minutes before noon, Obama swore to “faithfully execute the office” and “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution in a ceremony that lasted hardly a minute.
 
The president stood next to First Lady Michelle Obama, holding her family Bible, and their two daughters, Sasha and Malia. Chief Justice John Roberts administered the 35-word oath, more smoothly than he did four years ago, in front of rolling cameras and a small group of family and friends.

The intimate ceremony was a quirk of the calendar and an adherence to tradition. The 20th Amendment to the Constitution states that a president’s term ends at noon on Jan. 20. When that date falls on the Sunday, presidents have delayed the public ceremony a day and opted for a simple swearing-in at the White House…

…The president began his day at Arlington National Cemetery, where he and Vice President Joe Biden, fresh from his own swearing-in ceremony, laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns under a clear-blue winter sky.

From there, the president and first lady, infrequent churchgoers, made a rare visit to a historically black church, Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal, the oldest A.M.E church in the nation’s capital. The first African American president, who almost never discusses his own place in history, sat in the pews where 119 years ago congregants listened to Frederick Douglass’ last speech, a call for racial and class equality.

“Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another,” the former slave said in 1894. “Based upon the eternal principles of truth, justice and humanity, and with no class having any cause of complaint or grievance, your Republic will stand and flourish forever.”…

Read the entire article here.

Obama’s inauguration carries symbolic resonance on Martin Luther King Day

The Guardian
2013-01-20

Gary Younge, Feature Writer and Columnist

America’s first black president will be sworn in on the day devoted to its most famous civil rights leader

In April 1961, four months before Barack Obama was born, Bobby Kennedy told Voice of America: “There’s no question that in the next 30 or 40 years a negro can also achieve the same position that my brother has as president of the United States.” Less than a month later a group of black and white freedom riders were firebombed and beaten with baseball bats and lead piping as they tried to travel through the south. The interracial marriage of Obama’s parents was not recognised in more than 20 states. Black people’s right to vote, let alone stand for election, had not been secured in much of the south. The prospect of a black president never seemed further away.

Four years later the essayist and author James Baldwin mocked Kennedy’s prediction. “That sounded like a very emancipated statement to white people,” he wrote in The American Dream and the American Negro. “They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear the laughter and bitterness and scorn with which this statement was greeted … We were here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you are good, we may let you become president.”

The fact that Obama’s inauguration is taking place on Martin Luther King Day – a federal public holiday to celebrate the birth of the civil rights leader – carries great symbolic resonance. The notion that America might vote in a black president now seems little more than a banal fact of life…

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Obama Should Talk About Being Biracial

The Daily Beast
2013-01-20

David Kaufman

The President identifies as black, but David Kaufman hopes that during his second term, he’ll also discuss his biracial heritage.

Four years after he first entered the White House, there’s no longer anything surprising about calling Barack Obama—America’s first black president—a “transformational” leader. Yet the full extent of Obama’s transformational potential has yet to be realized in one realm: his biracial heritage.

Obama’s 1995 book Dreams from my Father makes clear that his identity was influenced as much—if not more—by his Caucasian mother than his absentee African father. But since he won the Democratic nomination in 2008, both Obama and the media seem to have shut the closet door on his multi-culti background. With his black wife and children by his side, Obama certainly represents an aspirational—and much-needed—African-American cultural ideal. But with one half of his family history so conspicuously overlooked, whether by circumstance or design, that ideal is not the entire story of his identity.

To a certain extent, I think it’s been an act,” San Francisco State University Professor Andrew Jolivétte—editor of Obama and the Biracial Factor, a collection of essays—says of the president’s mono-racial messaging. “The President has been afraid to speak more openly about being biracial because it could be read in so many different ways.”…

…With so few journalists actually asking the President about being mixed-race, Obama has conversely had very little to tell them. Or maybe because he’s so publicly—and repeatedly—identified as black in the past, the President simply feels he has nothing left to reveal. “Some might suggest he’s purposely not talking about it, but perhaps his mixed heritage is no longer some on-going restless question for Obama,” suggests Michele Elam, Professor in the Department of English and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. “I don’t think he’s repressing his mixed heritage or capitulating to the ‘one-drop’ rule,” Elam continues. “For Obama, the choice to identify as black has never been merely about biology or blood … He sees blackness as containing differences of experience and ancestry.”…

Read the entire aritcle here.

Obama sworn in at low-key White House ceremony

China Daily-USA
2013-01-21

WASHINGTON – US President Barack Obama took the official oath for his second term on Sunday at the White House in a small, private ceremony that set a more subdued tone compared to the historic start of his presidency four years ago.

Gathered with his family in the Blue Room on the White House’s ceremonial main floor, Obama put his hand on a family Bible and recited the 35-word oath that was read out loud by US Chief Justice John Roberts.

“I did it,” Obama said as he hugged his wife, Michelle, and daughters Sasha and Malia. “Thank you, sweetie,” he told Michelle when she congratulated him. “You didn’t mess up,” Sasha Obama told her father.

It was a low-key start to the first African-American US president’s second term, which is likely to be dominated – at least at the start – by budget fights with Republicans and attempts to reform gun control and immigration laws…

Read the entire article here.

Obama sworn in for second term

France 24
2013-01-20

US President Barack Obama on Sunday was sworn in for a second four-year term at a small, private ceremony at the White House. He will take the oath again on Monday at the Capitol during a public swearing-in.

A still-popular Barack Obama took the presidential oath of office for a second term on Sunday, facing a troubled future but hoping to leave behind a battering four years at the helm of a government mired in ugly political division.
 
When Obama first took office as the 44th U.S. president, many Americans hoped the symbolism of the first black man in the White House was a turning point in the country’s deeply troubled racial history. Obama vowed to moderate the partisan anger engulfing the country, but the nation is only more divided four years later, perhaps as deeply as at any time since the U.S. Civil War 150 years ago.
 
Obama was sworn in by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts during a brief ceremony with his family in the White House Blue Room, meeting the legal requirement that presidents officially take office on Jan. 20. Because that date fell on a Sunday this year, the traditional ceremonies surrounding the start of a president’s term were put off to Monday, which coincides this year with the birthday of revered civil rights leader Martin Luther King. He was assassinated in 1968…

Read the entire article here.

Obama sworn in for second term

The New Zealand Herald
2013-01-21

Stepping into his second term, President Barack Obama took the oath of office in an intimate swearing-in ceremony at the White House, the leader of a nation no longer in the throes of the recession he inherited four years ago, but still deeply divided.

The president, surrounded by family in the ornate White House Blue Room, was administered the oath by Chief Justice John Roberts. With Obama’s hand resting on a Bible used for years by Michelle Obama’s family, the president vowed “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” echoing the same words spoken by the 43 men who held the office before him.

“I did it,” Obama whispered to his youngest daughter, Sasha, as he wrapped her in a hug moments later.

The president said the oath in just minutes before noon on January 20 (local time), the time at which the Constitution says new presidential terms begin. There was little pomp and circumstance—Obama walked into the room flanked by his family and exited almost immediately after finishing the oath.

He’ll repeat the swearing-in ritual again on the west front of the Capitol before a crowd of up to 800,000 people.

Only about a dozen family members were on hand to witness Sunday’s swearing in, including the first lady, daughters Malia and Sasha, the president’s sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, and her family. Mrs. Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, and the first lady’s brother, Craig Robinson, and his family were also on hand, along with a few reporters and photographers.

Yet the mood in the nation’s capital was more subdued during this year’s inaugural festivities than it was four years ago, when Obama swept into office on a wave of national optimism, becoming the first African-American to hold the nation’s highest office. Since then, he has endured fiscal fights with Congress and a bruising re-election campaign – and has the gray hair and lower approval ratings to show for it…

Read the entire article here.

Inauguration Day: Obama sworn in for second term

BBC News
2013-01-20

Barack Obama has officially been sworn in for his second term as US president in a small ceremony at the White House.

Although the US Constitution requires the oath of office to be taken by noon on 20 January, that falls on a Sunday so the public inauguration will take place on Monday.

Mr Obama took his official oath in the White House’s Blue Room.

The public ceremony with pomp and circumstance will follow on Monday.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office to Mr Obama, witnessed by First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters Sasha and Malia as well as some family members and reporters.

Resting his hand on a bible used for many years by his wife’s family, Mr Obama vowed “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

He will repeat those words during Monday’s public inauguration, in which he will set out his plans for the next four years.

Vice-President Joe Biden was sworn in for a second term at a small ceremony at his official residence earlier on Sunday morning…

…In 2009, nearly two million people crammed into Washington to witness President Obama’s first inauguration.

Four years on, the mood is unlikely to match that excitement, says our correspondent.

But, he adds, the second inauguration of America’s first black president is a moment many will not want to miss….

Read the entire article here.

Obama Takes Oath in Quiet Ceremony

The New York Times
2013-01-20

Brian Knowlton

Doug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — With only his family nearby, President Obama was sworn into office in the White House before noon on Sunday in advance of Monday’s public pomp, the private moment forced by a rare quirk of the constitutional calendar but appropriately capturing the downsized expectations for his second term.

Even the Monday festivities, with the traditional inaugural parade, balls and not least the re-enactment outside the Capitol of Mr. Obama’s swearing-in, will be less spectacular than four years ago, when the new president embodied hope and change for most Americans at a time of global economic crisis and two wars. This year fewer parties are planned, and fewer people are expected to swarm the National Mall.

The private but official swearing-in of the 44th president at 11:55 a.m. was just the seventh such event in history to be held before the public ceremony, and the first since Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural, each one occurring because the constitutionally mandated date for the inauguration fell on a Sunday. Recorded and televised minutes later, the simple scene suggested a couple marrying before a justice of the peace, with a big ceremony and party planned for later.

Only Michelle Obama, holding her family Bible, and the couple’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, stood beside Mr. Obama, in the grand Blue Room as he recited the oath specified in the Constitution and again administered to him by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.…

…The president and his family later traveled to Washington to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, an historic church with a long record of activism against racism — it once harbored runaway slaves — to worship and to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The federal holiday honoring Dr. King coincides this year with Inauguration Day.

The congregation was enthusiastic, according to pool reports, and the sermon ended with a boisterous call and response of “Forward” – the president’s one-word campaign slogan.

These events took place mostly out of view of the hundreds of thousands of Americans, foreign visitors and dignitaries who have poured into Washington to be a part of the second inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president, a more restrained affair than four years ago but still a resonant marker in the nation’s history…

Read the entire article here.

In Second Inaugural Address, Can President Obama Reassure a Worried Public?

The Daily Beast
2013-01-19

Evan Thomas

These are gloomy times for an inauguration. In Newsweek, Evan Thomas asks: On Monday, can the president rise to the occasion with a historically inspiring message?

The last Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009, dawned bright and cold. More than a million people, possibly the largest live audience ever to see a president inaugurated, and certainly the biggest since Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration in 1965, streamed to the Washington Mall for Barack Obama’s oath-taking as the 44th president of the United States. Even the most jaded old Washington hands could feel a different vibe in the crowd—people seemed excited, happy, some teary-eyed to witness, for the first time in history, an African-American sworn in as chief executive.

A president who is writing (or, more likely, editing and refining) his inaugural address is confronted with a very difficult challenge: how to speak in his own true voice while at the same time speaking for every man and woman. The challenge to be at once unique and universal has defeated virtually all of Obama’s predecessors. With a few memorable ­exceptions—like JFK’s, Lincoln’s second, FDR’s first (“the only thing to fear is fear itself”)—inaugural addresses have long disappointed their expectant listeners. The words rarely live up to the occasion. Most inaugural addresses “tend not to be very good,” says presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “The best rhetoric has been used up in the campaign, and presidents don’t want to promise too much. They are planning to give their first State of the Union addresses in a few weeks and they don’t want to preempt. Plus, most presidents are not good speakers or writers.”…

Read the entire article here.