Mixed Race Studies

Barack Obama as the Great Man: Communicative Constructions of Racial Transcendence in White-Male Elite Discourses

Communication Monographs
Volume 78, Issue 4 (2011)
pages 535-556
DOI: 10.1080/03637751.2011.618140

Christopher B. Brown, Assistant Professor of Communications
Minnesota State University, Mankato

This study examined responses on the potential impact of Barack Obama’s presidency from 16 semi-structured interviews with White males in leadership positions in various organizations across the United States. While numerous studies examine the circulating racial discourses on Obama, few studies explore how he is represented in first-hand accounts from those in the public, specifically from White-male elites. This study examined interview discourses from White-male elites to reveal how they imagine race through Obama. In positioning Obama among the pantheon of great-man leaders, this study showed how dominant racial ideologies get legitimatized and reworked when members of the dominant group desire to construct racial meanings onto a popular Black leader.

I will never forget the morning after it was announced that Barack Obama would become the first African-American President of the United States. That morning, I got onto the bus and sat near a few people who were discussing the election results. As usual, I was the only African American on the bus; after all, the city of Albuquerque has a minuscule Black population. As I sat down, a Caucasian man, who was engaged in the conversation with two other passengers, immediately turned to me and congratulated me on the election. I looked at him quizzically, but replied, “I appreciate it.” At that point another man, apparently Latino, turned to me and said, “See brother, you don’t have much to worry about anymore.” I replied ambivalently, “I guess everything is all good now!” He ardently insisted, “Yeah brother, there are going to be a few changes; don’t you think so?” I shrugged and sheepishly replied, “I guess it looks that way.” The night of the announcement, I too felt proud, but I doubted that Obama’s election would extract the systematic and oppressive circumstances of a racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist society. Sensing that I was not sharing their enthusiasm, the passengers turned away from me and continued with their discussion.

During this time, I was conducting interviews with White males in leadership positions in their organizations to understand how they characterize leadership and heroism. In talking about leaders in US history, they all extolled the valor and foresight of the forefathers in creating a vision for what would eventually become the basic virtues of the US democracy. Some even praised the heroic acts of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy for galvanizing movements in circumstances where their viewpoints were considered unpopular in the mainstream. While my initial interest was to understand how these men construct leadership, I was quite surprised to hear how candidly they spoke to the leadership potential of Barack Obama. Like the passengers on the bus, these men embraced Obama as someone with the potential to alter the course of history, because he represented a healthy vision of future race relations in the United States. It is at this point that I began to ponder how the intersection of my racial and gender identity with that of the bus riders and these leaders gave rise to reflections verifying that racism has little to do with the politics of race in the United States.

The present study examines how and why race enters into the discussion of masculinized leadership when discourses of racial transcendence are appropriated by White-male elites in a cross-race interview context. Specifically, I analyze the rhetorical tactics (see Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) that these White-male elites employ when positioning Obama among the pantheon of great men in history. In this essay, I defined White-male elites as those who self-identified as White; who work in high profile positions such as chief executive officer, president, or partner in law firm; and who are US citizens. Unlike most people of color and White women, White-male elites fit the description of people who occupy spaces in which they can reside in various privileged locations: White, male, nominally heterosexual, affluent relative to economic status, and privileged relative to educational status. Scholarship rarely documents White-male elites’ constructions of race (though see Feagin & O’Brien, 2003). In fact, scholarly research on race and communication provides considerably more attention to the views of ordinary White people like college students (Bonilla-Silva & Forman, 2000; Jackson & Crawley, 2003; Jackson & Heckman, 2002; Martin, Krizek, Nakayama, & Bradford, 1996; Moon, 1999). In that regard, I contend that communication scholars must pay close attention to White-male elite expressions on race and ethnicity, given the relative power and privilege that comes with their linguistic and rhetorical styles, and given that institutional spaces are organized around their cultural repertories.

In commenting on studies of race and communication, Allen (2007) asserted that communication theorists often “neglect to delve into race in critical, substantive ways” (p. 259). I heed Allen’s concern and show how ideological discourses of race manifest in White-male elites’ constructions of Obama. This requires considering the implications for valorizing discourses of great-man leadership through discursive constructions of Obama. As Jennings (1960) and Wrightsman (1977) have noted in their critique of the great-man theory, a sudden act by a great man could alter the fate of the nation as great men maintain the appropriate traits for a particular point in history. It is my contention that these White-male elites embrace Obama as a great man leader to suggest haphazardly that it is better to speak of racism in the past tense. As we will see, critical work on race not only examines racial discourse and its manifestations, but also investigates its imaginative (or ideological) dimensions (Leonardo, 2005) how these White-male elites imagine race through Obama to suit their own ideological purposes…

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A Response to Ben Pitcher’s “Obama and the Politics of Blackness: Antiracism in the ‘post-black’ Conjuncture” [Rickey Hill]

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
Volume 12, Issue 4 (2010) (Post-Racial Politics and Its Discontents)
pages pages 347-350
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2010.526058

Rickey Hill, Professor of Social Science
Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, Mississippi

There is no “post-Black conjuncture.” Neither are we, in the United States, living in a post-racial moment. The coming of Barack Hussein Obama as the first Black person to be elected president of the United States has not signaled the end of racial domination as practice or racism as ideology. Racial domination continues to structure the lives of Black people and other nonwhite people in American society. Racism remains the active ideology that rationalizes institutional life and pervades the public and private spheres of interactions and reactions between people of color and the dominant white group. To be sure, Black people and other nonwhite people also suffer because the vast majority of them occupy the lower rungs of the economic ladder. However, while class is a determinant to economic wherewithal and access, race remains the dominant contradiction in the great socioeconomic divide.

Despite racial domination, and because of it. Blackness strives as a concrete cultural, psychological, political, and social force. Contrary to Pitcher’s thinking, “Obama’s claim on Blackness” is not “delimited by his not having been born to the descendants of slaves.” Obama’s claim on Blackness is instead enhanced because…

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Fear of a Black President

The Atlantic
September 2012

Ta-Nehisi Coates

As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.

Part of that conservatism about race has been reflected in his reticence: for most of his term in office, Obama has declined to talk about the ways in which race complicates the American present and, in particular, his own presidency. But then, last February, George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old insurance underwriter, shot and killed a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman, armed with a 9 mm handgun, believed himself to be tracking the movements of a possible intruder. The possible intruder turned out to be a boy in a hoodie, bearing nothing but candy and iced tea. The local authorities at first declined to make an arrest, citing Zim­mer­man’s claim of self-defense. Protests exploded nationally. Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea assumed totemic power. Celebrities—the actor Jamie Foxx, the former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, members of the Miami Heat—were photographed wearing hoodies. When Rep­resentative Bobby Rush of Chicago took to the House floor to denounce racial profiling, he was removed from the chamber after donning a hoodie mid-speech…

…By virtue of his background—the son of a black man and a white woman, someone who grew up in multiethnic communities around the world—Obama has enjoyed a distinctive vantage point on race relations in America. Beyond that, he has displayed enviable dexterity at navigating between black and white America, and at finding a language that speaks to a critical mass in both communities. He emerged into national view at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, with a speech heralding a nation uncolored by old prejudices and shameful history. There was no talk of the effects of racism. Instead Obama stressed the power of parenting, and condemned those who would say that a black child carrying a book was “acting white.” He cast himself as the child of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas and asserted, “In no other country on Earth is my story even possible.” When, as a senator, he was asked if the response to Hurricane Katrina evidenced racism, Obama responded by calling the “ineptitude” of the response “color-blind.”

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishments to be “twice as good.” Hence the need for a special “talk” administered to black boys about how to be extra careful when relating to the police. And hence Barack Obama’s insisting that there was no racial component to Katrina’s effects; that name-calling among children somehow has the same import as one of the oldest guiding principles of American policy—white supremacy. The election of an African American to our highest political office was alleged to demonstrate a triumph of integration. But when President Obama addressed the tragedy of Trayvon Martin, he demonstrated integration’s great limitation—that acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. And even then, full acceptance is still withheld. The larger effects of this withholding constrict Obama’s presidential potential in areas affected tangentially—or seemingly not at all—by race. Meanwhile, across the country, the community in which Obama is rooted sees this fraudulent equality, and quietly seethes…

…Shirley Sherrod has worked all her life to make a world where the rise of a black president born of a biracial marriage is both conceivable and legal. She has endured the killing of relatives, the ruination of enterprises, and the defaming of her reputation. Crowley, for his actions, was feted in the halls of American power, honored by being invited to a “beer summit” with the man he had arrested and the leader of the free world. Shirley Sherrod, unjustly fired and defamed, was treated to a brief phone call from a man whose career, in some profound way, she had made possible. Sherrod herself is not immune to this point. She talked to me about crying with her husband while watching Obama’s Election Night speech. In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. “What will my babies say?,” Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. “How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?”…

…And yet this is the uncertain foundation of Obama’s historic victory—a victory that I, and my community, hold in the highest esteem. Who would truly deny the possibility of a black presidency in all its power and symbolism? Who would rob that little black boy of the right to feel himself affirmed by touching the kinky black hair of his president?…

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Nation of Cowards: Black Activism in Barack Obama’s Post-Racial America

Indiana University Press
2012-08-14
176 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-253-00628-8

David H. Ikard, Associate Professor of English
Florida State University

Martell Lee Teasley, Professor of Social Work
University of Texas, San Antonio

In a speech from which Nation of Cowards derives its title, Attorney General Eric Holder argued forcefully that Americans today need to talk more—not less—about racism. This appeal for candid talk about race exposes the paradox of Barack Obama’s historic rise to the US presidency and the ever-increasing social and economic instability of African American communities. David H. Ikard and Martell Lee Teasley maintain that such a conversation can take place only with passionate and organized pressure from black Americans, and that neither Obama nor any political figure is likely to be in the forefront of addressing issues of racial inequality and injustice. The authors caution blacks not to slip into an accommodating and self-defeating “post-racial” political posture, settling for the symbolic capital of a black president instead of demanding structural change. They urge the black community to challenge the social terms on which it copes with oppression, including acts of self-imposed victimization.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Is America a Nation of Cowards or Has Attorney General Eric Holder Lost His Mind?
• 1. The Teaching Moment that Never Was: Henry Louis Gates, Barack Obama, and the Post-Racial Dilemma
• 2. “I Know What’s in His Heart”: Enlightened Exceptionalism and the Problem with Using Barack Obama as the Racial Litmus Test for Black Progress and Achievement
• 3. The Audacity of Reverend Wright: Speaking Truth to Power in the 21st Century
• 4. Setting the Record Straight: Why Barack Obama and America Cannot Afford to Ignore a Black Agenda
• 5. Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps: Barack Obama, the Black Poor, and the Problems of Racial Common Sense
• Index

Obama and Myths of Racial Democracy

NACLA Report
North American Congress on Latin America
2008-11-17

Marisol LeBrón

Political pundits have celebrated president-elect Barack Obama’s sweeping and historic victory as evidence that the United States has taken an initial step toward a “post-racial” or “colorblind” society.

In a recent Los Angeles Times Op-Ed, Shelby Steele provocatively asked, “Doesn’t a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn’t it imply a ‘post-racial’ America?” Analysts on both sides of the political spectrum have answered yes. Phillip Morris of the Cleveland Plains Dealer declared, “America has completed its evolution into a racial meritocracy.” While Jonathan Kay of Canada’s National Post wrote, “Electing a black president won’t instantly cure ‘the ugly racial wound left by America’s history’ (as The Economist put it in its Obama endorsement). But it will at least prove that America has finally become a fundamentally post-racial society—a place where tribal loyalties are based on ideology, not skin color.” Meanwhile, another conservative columnist, Laura Hollis of Townhall.com, flatly claimed, “Racism is dead.”…

…U.S. commentators most often point to the concept of mestizaje as an example of Latin America’s seamless racial integration. Mestizaje, or racial mixing, is often seen as diametrically different to historical U.S. legal sanctions against miscegenation—the so-called “one-drop” rule. Mestizaje is cited as a prime example of how Latin Americans have been able to move beyond race. Although mestizaje has different historical roots and trajectories within different Latin American countries, there has been a rhetorical emphasis across the board on a kind harmonious racial exceptionalism at work in Latin America…

…The promotion of mestizaje and racial democracy in Latin America has often existed alongside, and as part of, the suppression of populations of African and indigenous descent. National identities based on mestizaje served the dual purpose of “uniting” fractious nations under one banner while at the same time promoting the mass marginalization of racial and ethnic groups by denying their discrimination.

Several scholars have helped dispel the myth of racial democracy in Latin America by documenting what is often referred to as blanqueamiento (whitening), or mejorando la raza (improving the race). In one example, blanqueamiento is actively sought out by marrying a lighter-skinned person, thereby producing lighter, racially mixed offspring. Sociologist Ginetta E. B. Candelario has traced the many ways blanqueamiento is promoted in Dominican society. As evidence, she points to the range of skin creams and hair products marketed to produce a whiter-looking phenotype among Dominican women…

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Obama and the black wave: Deconstructing myths, building strategies

Pambazuka News: Pan-African Voices for Freedom and Justice
2009-02-19 (Issue 420)

Raquel Luciana de Souza

Having closely followed Barack Obama’s electoral success, Raquel Luciana de Souza considers the prospects for a presidential candidate of African descent within the South American giant of Brazil. Scrutinising the historical myth of Brazil’s racial democracy and the supposed absence of formal barriers to Afro-Brazilian social mobility in contrast to the US, de Souza considers the role of the US’s implementation of measures to address socio-racial disparities and the successful struggles of black organisations in framing the broader background behind Obama’s rise.

At last the calendar signals the much anticipated 4 November 2008, the day the long marathon of the latest American electoral process would be concluded. It is impossible to ignore the irony that after spending nine years of my life studying in the United States, I found myself in front of the television in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, homeland of Gilberto Freyre. Freyre, of course, was the very author whose racist, sexist, and fairly imaginative visions about race relations in Brazil influenced generations of national and international researchers, politicians, intellectuals, as well as common sense notions about class, race, and racism in Brazil. As the counting of the votes officially begins, a friend cautions me about the possibility of a McCain victory, which triggers an unutterable anguish in the very core of my being. However, that feeling was quickly replaced by the absolute thrill of witnessing the reconfiguration of the American electoral map. At the first hour of 5 November, it was confirmed that the US had elected its first black president. Barack Obama’s triumph was the culmination of a highly competitive political contest; the media and global frenzy surrounding the Democratic candidate’s campaign became gradually more palpable as he gained strength in opinion and voter intention polls. That day I realised that I had spent months holding my breath, immersed in an intense electoral process that was marked by unprecedented circumstances. For the first time, a black man and a woman vied to be nominated for presidential candidate of the Democratic Party…

…Therefore, while I euphorically contemplated the conclusion of an electoral process that culminated with the election of a black president for the position of commander-in-chief of the US, questions and speculations about the ramifications of such an important political development for Brazil and the African Diaspora consumed me. The triumph of a high-ranking politician, the son of a continental African from Kenya and a white American woman from Kansas, was consolidated before the whole world. Before me was a black president married to a black woman, both products of the highest quality of formal education acquired at Harvard, a prestigious university, and eloquent lawyers who demonstrated in their discourse and intervention an almost unwavering self-confidence and mastery of words that slowly but surely conquered even the favouritism of the media. As a researcher of racial issues through a comparative perspective, I realised then that such a political moment urged for perspectives and approaches that went beyond pre-established parameters. Aiming to discuss the possible ramifications of such political scenery and its broader implications more adequately, I constantly transferred my thoughts to the Brazilian context…

…Conversely, we should now consider the real scenery in which Barack Obama became the first black president of the US. In Brazil, the celebration of such a historical event has been featured prominently on the front page of all the mainstream newspapers and magazines. A sort of cynical satisfaction has also been displayed on the faces of TV anchors, political commentators, and reporters as they announced and discussed the fact that Americans had elected their first black president. Images from the US of whites, blacks, and others who celebrated Obama’s victory in euphoric tears were exhibited, demonstrating that the country had finally transcended the racism that had infested its social, legal, political, and educational relations for so many centuries. Yet, for the most accurate eyes and ears, what was implicit in accounts of celebration disseminated through Brazilian mass media was the notion that such cathartic and healing experiences were not needed in Brazil. In fact, what was almost cynically celebrated was the fallacy that finally the USA had overcome their racial injuries, while our racial problems had been resolved many decades ago, if they ever existed. After all, according to traditional hegemonic narratives that romanticise race relations in Brazil, Brazilians never had to deal with formal racial segregation that established barriers to the socio-economic ascension of Africans and their descendants, and therefore there would be no wounds to be healed and no damage to be repaired…

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Barack Obama’s Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience, and the (Im)possibility of Racial Reconciliation

Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2005
pages 571-593
DOI: 10.1353/rap.2006.0006

David A. Frank, Professor of Rhetoric
Robert D. Clark Honors College
University of Oregon

Mark Lawrence McPhail, Dean of The College of Arts & Communication
University of Wisconsin, Whitewater

The two authors of this article offer alternative readings of Barack Obama’s July 27, 2004, address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) as an experiment in interracial collaborative rhetorical criticism, one in which they “write together separately.” David A. Frank judges Obama’s speech a prophetic effort advancing the cause of racial healing. Mark Lawrence McPhail finds Obama’s speech, particularly when it is compared to Reverend Al Sharpton’s DNC speech of July 28, 2004, an old vision of racelessness. Despite their different readings of Obama’s address, both authors conclude that rhetorical scholars have an important role to play in cultivating a climate of racial reconciliation.

…Using an approach similar to that of Forde-Mazrui, Obama’s speech drew from his multiracial background to craft a speech designed to bridge the divides between and among ethnic groups. He writes in his moving autobiography, Dreams from My Father, “I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.” Coherence, Obama writes, is a function of translation and the capacity to move between and among worlds. He was repulsed by whites who used racist language, and could not use the phrase “white folks” as a synonym for bigot as it was undercut by the memories of the love and nonracist impulses of his white mother and grandfather. His speech at the convention reflects, as McPhail notes, an ability to integrate competing visions of reality. Obama did so by using a rhetorical strategy of consiliencey where understanding results through translation, mediation, and an embrace of different languages, values, and traditions. This embrace was intended to inspire a “jumping together” to common principles…

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From deracialization to racial distinction: interpreting Obama’s successful racial narrative

Social Semiotics
Volume 23, Issue 1 (2013)
pages 119-145
DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2012.707039

Charlton McIlwain, Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication
New York University

While many scholars attribute Barack Obama’s success in the 2008 presidential election to his so-called deracialized campaign strategy, I argue that Obama constructed a persuasive message strategy that was fundamentally based on race. I argue that in pursuing what I call a racial distinction strategy, Obama mobilized race differently than previous Black candidates running in White-voter electoral majorities. Specifically, Obama’s racial distinction strategy constructed a seamless racial narrative – deployed through constellations of subtle racial language and imagery – incorporating Obama’s own personal biography within a broader narrative of the nation, specifically a narrative of American progress. The fact that Obama employed a racial distinction strategy, and the fact that he succeeded in doing so, sheds new light on, and leads us to reconsider the veracity of popular political theories such as post-Blackness, post-racialism and deracialization, along with the general ideology of colorblindness.

Barack Obama’s election as the 44th President of the United States was historic, not only because he achieved something no other Black American had accomplished, but because he attained the political heights many believed no Black American could. Few Black American candidates have been elected to federal office, especially when elections require support from White voters (Lublin 1997). Black candidates’ fear of White voters mobilizing racial prejudice against them has historically prevented Black candidates from even attempting to run in campaign contests where Blacks and other minorities do not comprise the majority of voters. However, Obama not only believed he could win, despite the historical racial odds, but also demonstrated that America was indeed ready and willing to elect a Black president.

Many explanations of Obama’s success focus on his ability to sidestep a variety of racial attacks throughout the primary and general election. Carly Fraser, for instance, writes “As a post-black candidate. Obama did not once make reference to the historic fact that he would be the first African American to have a real chance of winning the democratic nomination.” Fraser continues, saying that race was .. repeatedly acknowledged by the media, his [Obama’s] opponents, his surrogates, and eventually by the candidate himself” (Fraser 2009, 17). Similarly, Manning Marable writes, “Obama minimized the issue of race, presenting a race-neutral politics that reached out to White Republicans and independents. Yet despite his..

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Is Obama Now Black (Enough) Because He’s White?

The Huffington Post
2012-08-02

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

With the November election less than 100 days away, the Obama campaign continues to come up against questions about the president’s racial identity. Most recently, reports that the president is “passing,” or claiming that he’s representing himself as a member of a different racial group than the one(s) to which he belongs, have resurfaced. For instance, actor Morgan Freeman recently told NPR, “America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president — he’s America’s first mixed-race president.” The logic I see behind such claims is twofold. First, the president is not really African American because his American mother is white (and, by extension, his ancestors were not enslaved). Second, that “mixed-race” and “black” are mutually exclusive ways of being…

…The revelation that the president and his mother are descendents of the “first slave” provides us all with an opportunity to acknowledge racial relationships with all their problems and awkwardness. Perhaps now, rather than merely questioning the president’s racial identity, we can pose bigger questions about the meanings of race. Questions like: Is slavery still the defining experience of African American identity? If so, who says so? Is any racial identity—multiracial, African American, white—better understood as an idea that can change over time? Wouldn’t it be real progress to admit that an increasing number of people who identify with monoracial identities like black and white might also be mixed? How do we deal with the too often painful history of racial mixing in African American communities? How many families that we know as white might actually come from a history of racial mixing and passing?…

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Is Being Biracial an Advantage for Obama?

ABC News
2008-03-21

Emily Friedman

The son of a black man and a white woman, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., says he’s seen and heard it all.
 
From his grandmother’s fear of black men on the street to his former pastor’s perceived anti-American rants, Obama said Tuesday that after a lifetime straddling the line between black and white he remains hopeful that a “more perfect union” is, in fact, possible.
 
Several biracial individuals with similar backgrounds agreed that living both sides of the racial experience may offer an unique perspective on bridging the racial divide.
 
“All of us who have those experiences are given the gift of a life lesson in bridging artificial divisions to arrive at common hopes and values,” said Lise Funderburg who is biracial and the author of “Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity.”
 
“All of us who have that background have the opportunity to make this positive thing out of it, and Obama has seized that opportunity,” Funderburg said.
 
But not everyone was certain Obama’s views and motives were were so clear cut. Biracial writer Shelby Steele told ABCNEWS.com that he thinks Obama’s use of his background was “disingenuous.” He believes the ruminations about mixed heritage show Obama to be not an expert but rather a man confused about his racial identity.
 
“Obama is a black man with a white mother. Being biracial is an impossibility,” said Steele, who said that no matter what, when Obama walks down the street he is viewed as a black man. “How could you possibly live as both? If you didn’t know his mother was white, you’d say he’s black and you wouldn’t have a second thought.”
 
“He’s confused,” said Steele of Obama. “Are you really black or are you playing the biracial card?”
 
Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor and director of the WEB Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, is considered one of the country’s leading black intellectuals and he believes politics was the major motivation at play in the Tuesday appeal…

…Being biracial, said Funderburg, allows a person insight into two very different worlds … a useful tool when trying to mediate issues between them…

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