Senator Obama’s Father Is Not Black

         I don’t mean to be rude or disrespectful. But Senator Obama’s father is not black. To use the black label is to embrace the one drop rule invented by U.S. slave masters; it is to tell a Kenyan from Africa or a Jamaican from the West Indies, that you can grow up with great pride in your nation of origin but, get off the plane at JFK, and Senator Obama will redefine you by using one of three all-important social identities: white, black, or person of color.

   Senator: How can we ever be colorblind if, following your lead, we still make skin color a crucial social identity? And how can we move into a post racial world if our most prominent “multiracial” American fails to broadcast the good news of science. There is one race, the human race; it originated in Africa and my or the Senator’s affinity to anyone from Kenya is quite clear: In an evolutionary sense we are all Africans.

    The tragedy is that Senator Obama and the other Presidential candidates refuse to take advantage of an unprecedented historical opportunity. Thanks to our most recent immigrants, we now have more than fifty million Americans who do not or will not fit into the white/black dichotomy. Latinos, Asians, South Asians, West Indians and Arabs come from nations that crash our operating system of racial beliefs. We can actually create a colorblind America if we are willing to honestly answer the questions posed by millions of newcomers.

    A Pakistani or an Indian, for example, is often much darker than an African American but we do not call them black. So what are they? Today none of the above receives the check mark because, as Shekhar Deshpande puts it, he is a “nowhere man”. He does not get a color but the dichotomy always influences his life because the degree of tolerance and acceptance that he receives is shaped by his place on the white/black continuum.

        Think too of the obsessively color conscious Census Bureau.  It says that everyone from North Africa is white. Presumably one drop of white blood makes you white, so, using this reverse one drop rule, the Census Bureau  leads us to this conclusion: White people committed the hideous 9/11 attack.

      That’s ridiculous. But, with a new Census on the horizon, none of the candidates use the dilemmas of our “none of the above” immigrants to seriously challenge the operating system that produces these absurdities; in fact, if we listen to Senator Obama we may have one of history’s greatest ironies, a black President who, quite unintentionally, makes white people more important than ever before.

   That is possible because the white/black dichotomy divides the entire world into white people, black people and people of color.  Under this operating system you can be as light as a Chinese person or as bronze as a Mexican but the two groups still get the same designation: Person of color.

        So, if many millions of recent immigrants assimilate into U.S. culture, they dramatically increase our people of color population, and that makes white people more important than ever because whites are the designer original against which everyone else is judged.  In the United States, white is not a color, but blacks and people of color only exist in relation to white people who do not get a color because they are white, which is not a color.

     The incredible power of white people is even more forcefully underlined when we use the synonym for people of color. That synonym is non-white, among the most powerful eight letters in the English language. In 1970, when other African Americans spoke about black power, Albert Murray told us that the word nonwhite contains all the fundamental assumptions of white supremacy and segregation.” He correctly stressed that blacks and people of color are always negatives when measured against the white role model. And he also understood that the deepest roots of segregation lay in the learned need of whites to stay away from blacks and people of color. Why, after all, would a positive want to hang around with a negative?  In real life positives cling to one another so tightly that, in the 2000 Census, only 2.5% of whites indicated a multiracial status, and of those the vast majority fused with Asians, not African Americans.

     Any Presidential candidate who embraces a nonwhite way of thinking echoes the nineteenth century, not the twenty-first. A real change agent would use the experiences of our most recent immigrants to ask some revolutionary questions.

    If very dark skinned Indians and Pakistanis are not black, maybe the problem is our way of thinking, rather than the color of their skins. And, if very light skinned Chinese, Japanese and Korean Americans are not white, why not? Can you be too light to be white?

    Senator Obama: A new tomorrow begins by paraphrasing the words of Richard Pryor. There are no blacks in Africa. That is made in America poison and it stops today, or, with you, we walk into the future looking backwards.