Jackin' Race, Makin' All Trades: Obama and Perceived Raciality in the United States By Mosi Ifatunji

Just "what is" Barack Obama? Turns out, the answer may depend on just who you ask. To many whites, he is the multiracial love child of a black African student and a Middle American white woman who, after being abandoned by his father, became the beneficiary of the kind of cultural capital many white liberals are desperate to impart upon so many "disadvantaged" people of color living in the "inner city." For many African Americans he is (now) a beacon of hope and evidence that the black baby boomers actually accomplished something for black people during the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and '60s ­ a sign of vindication. For the growing population of black African immigrants and refugees living in the United States, he is, quite simply, African.

There is much that is known about how many whites see most blacks. That is, during the last half of the 19th century a slew of social scientists taught us that white people generally don't like black people very much. Nonetheless they are willing to tolerate us, mostly on account of the immorality of the alternative and as long as there are no cultural or material consequences. Give thanks for racial tolerance in America. However, as we all know, Barack Obama is not simply a "black man" (also known as a male descendent of American slavery), he is the first-born child of a white mother and black African migrant student father. Well, social science has also taught us about what this might mean for how many whites may perceive Obama's raciality.

Indeed, scholars have noted that white employers see black immigrants (from the British West Indies at least) in a different light than they do African Americans. According to some of the whites interviewed by Harvard Sociologist, Mary Waters in her acclaimed book Black Identities, whites prefer to hire black immigrants, at least in part, because they carry no grudge over American slavery and tend to "see race" differently than their African American peers. This allows whites to hold black immigrants in a different esteem. An esteem that has allowed many black immigrants a type of opportunity that may indeed encourage them to work harder and to downplay calls of systematic white supremacy coming from all those other black people who unfortunately appear to suffer from "Racial Paranoia" in the social asylums of deindustrialization and the social welfare state (Jackson 2008, Wilson 1978 and 1987).

More recent work by Sociologists Melissa Herman of Dartmouth University and Mary E. Campbell of the University of Iowa shows that whites don't really know what to think of multiracial people in America. In my view, most whites consider multiracial people in the

United States to be simply black ­ at least as far as the treatment usually goes. Not so in this case. As many press reports suggest, for a great many white people Obama is, "Not just black, but he's white too." Therefore, white people the country over feel even less threatened by Obama because he is likely not to exact retribution on them for slavery and Jim Crow, because after all,  "he is white too."

So as with many things, scratch the surface and things get a lot more complicated. As such, it seems that the interactions between Obama being a second generation black immigrant, who is "half-white" and the beneficiary of some good old fashion white raisin'; Barak Obama is just about anything but "black" in the eyes of many whites.

So, what do African Americans see when they look at Obama? Well, speaking for the millions of African Americans currently living in the United States; apparently, we see a hard working smooth talking black man, three seconds away from giving it to whitey, once and for all. Just how is he going to accomplish this masterful feat? Ah but of course, even if he isn't saying anything about it in public, we all know; he's going to finally get us that 40 acres and a mule! Right? Actually, as with whites, African American support for Obama is indeed a bit more complex than it may let on at first. If for nothing else, wouldn't 90-some-odd percent of black folk be voting for the Democrat anyway? Setting this major confounding variable aside, we might say that African American support for Obama is not only religiously blind but also tenuous and skeptical.

Tenuous and skeptical? Absolutely! Many African Americans are quick to observe that Obama's black ancestors didn't toil with ours through the middle passage and chattel slavery. Moreover, we already don't like African immigrants because they think they are better than us and so the last thing we want or need is the first black president to be "African." And just how are we going to talk about white racism in a  country that elected a black president ­ in a landslide victory, mind you. Bootstraps anyone? However, despite the much more nuanced discussion of Obama happening in African American families and social networks, when America is listening, its; lights, camera, action! "This is a testimony to the great work of the civil rights movement and organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League. See what can happen when we stop using the word Nigger as a term of endearment? And thanks, Dr. King."

But just beneath the radar of much of the mainstream American media is the narrative that surrounds Obama among the growing black African immigrant population. For many of these migrants and refugees, Obama is not the 21st century incarnation of mulatto politics; nor is he the prodigal student of Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King. He is quite simply, a child of "mother Africa" (in a way that African Americans are not, of course). Instead, Obama represents the embodiment of a rising Africa and is therefore claimed as an African by many African immigrants. But what is really African or immigrant about Obama? If being African is mostly a cultural and social construction, what is African about being raised in a white family. It surely could not be the African cultural practices that he was stewed in as a child? The truth is, ownership claims to Obama made by African immigrants are the epitome of the same racial lens that so many Africans claim not to use ­ i.e., it's too much about genes and not enough about "­ology." That is to say, the only clear connection that Obama has to Africa rests somewhere in his biology. His socialization has instead been far more European than it is either black or African.

In my view, the black folks (African or African American) that want to claim his success story as one of their own might want to be mindful of the looming sneak attack hiding in the bushes just beyond the Greek columns of the Obama campaign. That is, once we all embrace his victory as a testimony of what we have to offer the world, right-wing radio talk show hosts the country over, will stop talking about McCain and start using Obama as exhibit A in an indictment of the cultural practices of the black family and a testimony of what hard work and a little color-blind racial ideology can do for "black people."