Notes
Notes 1. What’s Old Is New Again 1. For a succinct overview of the multiracial movement, see Melissa Nobles’s Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics, 129–45. 2. Sentience is a term frequently used in discussions of animal ethics, philosophy, and morality. 3. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sentient. 4. It should be noted that the “multiracial movement” and multiracial organizations include a diverse group of mixed-race advocates who represent an array of racial blending, some of whom are not “mixed” in the contemporary sense in which we use the term and many others who do not have black as a part of their identity makeup. For the purposes of this book’s focus, unless specified, my discussion of mixed race particularly speaks to black/white mixed-race identity. 5. For example, on February 25, 2004, The John Walsh Show (since canceled) aired “Multiracial: Where Do I Belong?” which centers on the tensions between black and biracial. The show’s guests included biracial “experts” such as Brooke Kroeger, author of Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are, and Rebecca Walker. Other guests represented a black/biracial dichotomy (for example, a black activist who opposes interracial marriage and biracial teenagers who claim to have the best of both worlds). More recently, an episode of The Tyra Banks Show, “Biracial Women Who Hate Their Other Side,” featured one black/ white mixed-race women who hated her blackness, fueling animosity from the audience. 6. I use black-sentient over black-identified because the mixed-race subjects in this study do not necessarily claim a black identity. 7. Homi Bhabha argues that vernacular cosmopolitanism “is to be on the border, in between, introducing the global-cosmopolitan ‘action at a distance’ into the very grounds—now displaced—of the domestic” (“Unsatisfied” 48). 8. Georgiana Banita argues, “Obama’s autobiographical writings blur the distinction between a transnational perspective of the United States seen as one global player among others and an exceptionalist view of America as the core from which a universally shared global humanity emanates” (25–26). As opposed Notes to Pages 6–9 130 to scholars who examine his biracial or bicultural identity, Banita argues that Obama’s writing “reject[s] the paradigm of multiethnic life writing as the mapping of mutable, hybrid subjectivities in favor of an investment in the self as both local . . . and avidly transnational” (26). 9. Other examples of such views include Stanley Crouch’s “What Obama Isn’t: Black Like Me,” published in the New York Daily News. 10. Mariah Carey echoed this sentiment, claiming “that her racial ambiguity is something that naturally attracts her to Barack Obama as a presidential candidate: ‘I can relate a lot to so many of the stories he tells. Clearly I am not the political analyst of the ages, but this is something that hits me on a deeper level than anything I’ve ever experienced growing up’” (qtd. in Crane, “She Owns the Night”). 11. Several scholars have made comparisons between Obama and Ellison, including M. Cooper Harris, “‘Let Us Not Falter Before Our Complexity’: Barack Obama and the Legacy of Ralph Ellison,” and chapter 7 of Gene Andrew Jarrett, Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature. 12. The Daily Kos, a liberal political blog, even accused the Clinton campaign of manipulating photos of Obama to make him appear blacker. See Kos, “Clinton Campaign Making Obama ‘Blacker.’” 13. There are, of course, exceptions, including two public figures, Ralph Nader and Jesse Jackson, who questioned Obama’s blackness in June 2008. In a Rocky Mountain News interview, Nader said that Obama talked white and suggested he was out of touch with the black masses. Jesse Jackson, in a live-microphone, off-camera comment, said Obama was “talking down to black people.” See Sprengelmeyer, “Nader: Obama Trying to ‘Talk White’” and Zeleny, “Jesse Jackson Apologizes for Remarks on Obama” for further discussion of these controversial statements. 14. See Jesse Washington, “Obama’s True Colors: Black, White . . . or Neither?” 15. Such views are common on the internet and in articles in popular-culture publications , such as Carl Campanile and George A. King, “Biracial Voters Take Pride in Obama’s ‘Milestone,’” in the New York Post. 16. Rainer Spencer argues that the mixed ancestry of African Americans problematizes the way some scholars and multiracial activists separate “first-generation” multiracial individuals from African Americans. He maintains that the “historical erasure of Afro-Americans...
OR
