Barack Obama transcends simplistic racial categorisation

Throughout the American presidential election ran the constant reference — optimistic, on the part of African Americans — to the possibility of America gaining its “first black president”.

Now that Barack Obama is on his way to the White House, while the references continue, they are coming under more scrutiny. The question being asked boils down to this: How the hell does a man who is the child of a white woman and a black man end up being consistently defined by the black side of his genetic inheritance and herded into the black, rather than the white, community? Obama himself, in refusing to singularly represent any race within the wider American population, has referred to himself as a “mutt.”

“I identify as African-American,” he says. “That’s how I’m treated and that’s how I’m viewed. I’m proud of it.”

He has managed to welcome without leading, a characterisation of himself as the first black president, and a position as representing the great and hitherto presidentially disenfranchised African-American community.

But he isn’t black. That’s the truth. He’s half black, half white. He was raised by white women. That the new president is glad to use his biracial background to raise the morale of a large proportion of the American population should not deflect from the deeper questions implicit in his categorisation: Why have the offspring of black and white parents always been described as black? And what is the significance of the unlegislated-for law underpinning that description?

One thing is certain. It is not a positive law. In America, it goes back to slavery, and to the use by the ruling classes (including Jefferson) of African slave women for covert sexual relations which amounted in most cases to recurring institutionalised rape of what they saw as their property, not as fellow human beings. Inevitably, in that context, emerging children were regarded as black. They had to be.

For starters, anything else would have endangered the master’s reputation and property rights, not to mention his relationship with his wife. In addition, the owner of slaves added to his asset base by the production of mulatto children. They may have been equally black and white, but in financial terms, the advantage to their progenitor was to have them black, so black they were.

The threat to the majority population was seen as so profound that white people even shared among themselves tips on how to identify as having “a touch of the tar brush” someone who might have only one black grandparent or great-grandparent.

That made sense — however inhuman the sense might be — in a slave-dependent economy. But, post-Emancipation, when intermarriage between African-Americans and Caucasians began to happen, it ostensibly made less sense. Yet it continued, albeit with a shifting rationale best exemplified by the word of the essayist Arthur, comte de Gobineau, in the mid-1800s. Gobineau acknowledged that what he saw as the self-evident intellectual superiority of the whites and the matching physical superiority of the blacks would, if intermingled, have advantages, but, significantly, he saw miscegenation as a dilution of the pure blood of the white race.

Just a few decades later, the same thinking began to emerge in Europe, particularly in Germany, in relation to Jews. Jews themselves were against racial intermingling, and the more orthodox the family, the more violent was — and still is — the opposition. Within living memory, for example, a Jewish former lord mayor of Cork confirmed on television that when one of his children had “married out” of the Jewish faith, he and his family had “sat shiva” for them. They had, in other words, cut them away from the family through a formal mourning process, the same as if they had died.

Despite strictures against marrying out, throughout the years of the Jewish diaspora, many Jews married Gentiles. In one sense, it was inevitable. In Germany, in the late 19th century, Jews, although relatively small in number, were heavily represented among the millionaires in Prussia. In the 1920s, out of every six lawyers in Germany, one was Jewish, and out of every nine doctors, one was Jewish. They were wealthy, influential, intellectual leaders within society, and therefore hugely attractive as life partners. Intermarriage happened, observance of Jewish religious practices faded as the Jewish man or woman was subsumed into their Gentile host family, and it was in many ways as unremarkable as a redhead marrying into a family of blonds.

Yet the Holocaust, just a few years later, was predicated on the twin assumptions that a) Jewish blood in some way polluted Aryan families, and b) that no matter how small the proportion of that blood in any individual, they must be assigned to the Jewish, rather than the Gentile community. In due course, the purification argument led to the decision that extinction of the Jews as a race was the “solution” to the “Jewish question”.

In this context, at this time, it is perhaps appropriate to give two cheers to Irish integration through intermarriage over the past two decades.

Two cheers, rather than three, because much of Irish society still carries a racist under-tow which hurts and damages both sides.

Nonetheless, the children of visibly mixed-race parents are not only not consigned to the minority group represented by their immigrant parent, but are generally and fairly comfortably described as “New Irish”. That category, of course, doesn’t solve the practical problem of describing someone from that group to someone from the majority group, and there’s what could be called a positive embarrassment around the issue. Irish people who would have no problem saying “D’you see that fat guy over there in the leather jacket?” or “You’ll know her, she’s not two hands higher than a duck and has Ribena-streaked hair,” struggle to be as direct when describing someone who is black (or black-and-white) lest drawing attention to the obvious might in some way be construed as racist.

Yet America, with its much longer history of intermarriage and biracialism, still talks of their new president as if he belonged to a minority group within society. The fact that — even if he accepts the definition — he so demonstrably transcends it carries the hope that his inauguration will be the start of its abandonment.

One professor of African and African-American studies at Dartmouth College, maintains that the process is already underway. The racial categories which have provided a too-easy shorthand in the past are, according to Professor Marty Favor, falling apart.

“This is the moment in the 21st century when we’re stepping across that simplistic black/white thing,” he says.

If Obama’s presidency lives up to even a proportion of the hopes vested in it, one of the unsought outcomes will be that, at the end of his time in the White House, the phrase “first black president” will have been rendered irrelevant, outdated and inapplicable.