Connecting the dots
I must be a little slow on the uptake these days as I hadn’t connected Obama’s being biracial when I blogged earlier about the apparent newsworthiness of the experiences of mixed folk. But it seems my people are rising up and will no longer let “Choose one” boxes keep us down.
Speaking generally on being brown in Tony Castro’s “King’s ‘Dream’ takes on new life: In Valley, African-Americans have become part of the middle class” from Wednesday’s Los Angeles Daily News is Morris Pichon, 66 (bolding mine):
You learn to avoid where you’re not wanted. You learn to avoid heartbreak. You learn to be invisible, if you can.
Later in the same article, lawyer Erikson Albrecht is quoted as follows:
The younger people are, the more social worlds they have for themselves that aren’t necessarily reflective of their ethnicity… I’m biracial, and I’ve always kind of lived my life not feeling particularly penned in anywhere, but having multiple circles of friends and multiple worlds that I live in.
But my identity, from an external point of view, I’m African-American to the majority of people in the world.
What’s interesting is that over here on this coast, in today’s New York Daily News, Bronx resident Sandra Boer is quoted by Patrick Huguenin in “Speech Is Life Of Party In Harlem: Thrilled cafe throng chants ‘Yes we can!’” as follows:
I’m half-Ecuadoran and half-Hungarian… I always felt like, ‘Where do I fit in?’ And Obama to me is such an interesting, eclectic mix.
He can understand a wide range of people, and he has woken up passion in people.
What’s curious to me is that on one side, people whose racial count >1 say that the ambiguity of their club membership is isolating (“internal loneliness” per Jolanda Williams). On the other side, it’s liberating, to not be penned in, to be able to move between two worlds.
For me, I’d have to say that both experiences are true (I have not yet made the grid that sums upside vs. downside). I do wonder if my observed childhood tendency to isolate myself from others was then reinforced by continuous messaging from those around me: I was different and did not belong in the club operated by the dominant status quo. As PZ Myers wrote in “Variant Genes-In-Waiting,” Seed Magazine:
Development is a plastic process in which organisms respond not just to a genetic program, but also interact with the environment … Raise the temperature of the developing organism enough to force it to struggle to cope, but not enough to seriously injure it, and sometimes surprising and unpredictable changes occur…
All of this, perhaps, is why I have to disagree with one paragraph in today’s “His rise reflects promise of a generation,” penned by Errol Louis for the New York Daily News:
The question is whether America is ready to bid goodbye to the bias of the past and entrust a brilliant, gifted man with the highest office in the land without regard to the color of his skin.
I think that to ignore the insights and character that have surely come from Obama’s having experienced the tension between how he views himself and how he is viewed, from knowing how it feels to be an outsider, from also being able to move in different spheres –
To truly disregard the color of his skin and all the upsides and downsides that have come with that –
I mean, really; again from the Seed article:
each of us differs from our unrelated fellows by approximately 3 million (out of 3 billion) nucleotides (0.1%)
But that 0.1% has downstream impacts significantly larger than 0.1%. So to ignore the color of his skin doesn’t make sense to me. It’s my belief that he is that much more suited to the office because of the color(s) if his skin, and all that entails.
Am I off the mark on this?
(And by ‘off the mark’ I don’t mean ‘politically incorrect’ (<– yawn!); I mean ‘thinking suboptimally’.)
