Dear Confused White People, Malia and Sasha Obama are NOT 'bi-racial'.

I'm reading in the comments, and I see this discussion going on.

I was reading Jezebel earlier and they were talking about the Obama girls and I notice this on other sites as well and want to ask a question. Since when are the Obama girls "biracial"? When did this happen?

Yeah, when did this happen?

This reply was given by our ever astute Town:

I think "biracial" is being pushed around by white people to divorce their non-white offspring/non-white person they like from the "undesirable" minority group they came from.

That's why it confuses many whites when Obama willingly, conciously CHOOSES to self-identify as black, marry a black woman and have two black kids. Why would he do that, they wonder?

I think the "biracial" movement is being pushed by whites who don't want their offspring stigmatized and by those non-whites who don't want to be stigmatized.

By calling the Obama girls "biracial" they are totally erasing Michelle from the mix. Which I guess is the point, huh?

Town, always comes around to the point of things.



In yesterday's discussion about Patricia J. Williams and Melissa Harris-Lacewell, I wrote this in the comments as a reply to a poster:
Obama is BLACK. This bi-racial mess is coming up because he's successful, and because he made the choice, and I do think it was a choice to be Black. Everyone knows what Lacewell means by it; well, I do. That is what startles so many about Obama - who, if given a choice, would CHOOSE to be Black? I mean, come on, Tiger Woods is darker than Obama and has a made up term for himself. While some purport that Obama is ' obviously bi-racial', to which I call BULL, because if we had done a 'Barbershop' test in 2004, passing around the pictures of Barack Obama and Harold Ford, Jr., asking which one was ' obviously bi-racial', who would have chosen OBAMA over the at least 2 shades lighter, green-eyed, born of two BLACK parents- Ford? Come on, now.


And, what does this sudden ' he's bi-racial' stuff really have at its core? It's to divorce Obama from the Black community, because we've ALWAYS been a multi-racial people, from the first time the Slave Owner went down to the slave quarters. That's how we can claim everyone from late NAACP head Walter White to Bernie Mac.

When White folk claim bi-racial Pookie that just robbed the store and shot a couple of people, I'll know it's about this ' bi-racial' category. Until then, it's about divorcing Obama from the Black community.

Now, folks aren't just satisfied in their attempt to divorce Barack Obama from the Black community. Now, they're trying to do it with Malia and Sasha?

Well, here's the skinny Confused White People.

Malia and Sasha are Black.

Because their Daddy is Black, and their Mama is Black. Two Black people produce BLACK children.

This is a picture of a Black mother with her BLACK children.



You want a picture of a bi-racial child, here it is:


Her mother is Black, Her father is Mexican. SHE is bi-racial.
She will speak Spanish and English. She will grow up eating tamales and collard greens. She will learn how to make flan and sweet potato pie. She will grow up hearing tales of Mexico and the Jim Crow South. When she gets older, she will begin making the trips that her mother did to our family home in Mississippi, and go to the cemetary where her ancestors, beginning with her great-great-great grandfather, are buried. Her mother has already booked the room next year for homecoming at Tuskegee.

Here's an FYI:
The Black community has ALWAYS been multi-racial. Has been ever since the first Slave Owner strolled down to the slave quarters. That's why when two Black people the only real hope that you can have with a child is that they be born ' normal and healthy'. You never know if a ' throwback' gene will kick in.

But, let's get back to Town's supposition that this is about Michelle.

Funny how it always gets back to Michelle.

I've written several articles over the course of the campaign about Michelle Obama as a Racial Rorschach Test.

Last summer, New York Magazine did a foul piece on the Obamas called " Black and BLACKER: The RACIAL Politics of the Obama Marriage."

When I did this post, I found a most appropriate quote from over at Michelle Obama Watch:

Sisters Gina and Nichelle summed it up well at Michelle Obama Watch:

The message from the article is that Black women are not suitable mates for successful Black men and you can’t trust him because he married HER.

Exactly. That is always the undercurrent in coverage of Michelle Obama. I guess the media is so used to seeing successful, educated Black men like Barack with women who are non-black or very light-skinned if they are Black. Historically, that has been the case so to see Barack with brown-skinned-clearly-black-not-mixed Michelle is making a lot of people lose their conservative AND liberal minds.

Good:)

I, too, believe this is half of the crux when it comes to Michelle Obama. The other half comes in what Chris Matthews described as ' all the bad stuff' associated with race that supposedly doesn't come when Barack comes to the table; you know, chattel slavery, the Middle Passage, the 3/5 of a human being thing, rapes, beatings, Jim Crow, legal oppression under the guise of Separate, but Equal'.

You know...all THAT 'bad stuff'.

Otherwise called AMERICAN HISTORY.

So, try as you might, it's a no go.

The President is Black. The First Lady is Black. The First Daughters are Black.

In case you haven't gotten the gist of this post: there's nothing wrong with being Black. What's wrong is that you'd actually think someone would want to divorce themselves of the Black Community, because YOUR definition of it is so narrow, so pathological, that it doesn't encompass the depth and breadth or beauty of the complexity of our humanity.