Had a conversation with my mom and my neighbors the other day about how they don't understand why people are making such a big deal out of Obama's "blackness" because he's really not all black, he's half-white too. And one of them said how really he's more white than black because he was raised by a white woman, lived in white community (he actually grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia but that's okay), got an education at a "good" college, etc. etc., so really his culture is more white than black. I asked her if she was making these comments to some how say that his "whiteness" validates his win, as opposed to if he was all black, and made the whole thing more acceptable, and she said no, no, no, that's not what she meant at all, she was just saying that he seemed more white than black and it's interesting how people are making such a "big deal" out of race. I then said that regardless of what culture he grew up around, he is still viewed as black by society and treated as such; the one-drop rule still applies. My mom immediately made a face and asked what the one-drop rule was, and after I explained it and that anyone with a drop of "black blood" in them is considered black, she laughed and said i was making this stuff up, that i need to live outside of the classroom and stop throwing around these sociology terms that no one else knows or believes in. thank god for the quickness of wikipedia because i went online and had them both read the definition for themselves, and even then my mom was like, "Well I don't know about that, everyone could be black then if you go by that rule! There were black Irish, how do you know we aren't black somewhere down the road!" A roll of my eyes and exclaiming that we would definitely have known if we should be checking the "African-American" box on censuses didn't seem to satisfy her.
My mom and I continued this conversation yesterday morning, and once again I couldn't quite find the words for what I was trying to express. She kept denying that by bringing up that "he's half-white" it's makes the point that the whole thing is more acceptable in the white communities eyes, and kept insisting that people are making too big of a deal out of race, that she doesn't see color when she sees people, and that to think our nation wouldn't vote for Obama just because he's black is underestimating the American people. I had exhausted my options of speech at this point and dropped the issue because I was starting to get frustrated, but then this morning I found this:
Ah, the wonder of youtube. I love it when you find things that put words in the place of your jumbled thoughts.
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