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Sunday 22 November 2009

Mixing it

Black or biracial? (Or both?) The editor of the Washington Post's Book World gets it just about right:

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go...

Of course there is much to celebrate in seeing Obama's victory as a victory for African Americans...We Hispanic Americans, very likely the most mixed-race people in the world, credit our gains to the great African American pioneers of yesterday... But Obama's ascent to the presidency is more than a triumph for blacks... As the great American poet Langston Hughes once wrote, "I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word 'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. . . . I am brown."

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