Color-blind contest: Did you know Obama is black?

Post Reply New Topic

Many people claim to be blind to racial differences, or "color-blind", referring to the political meaning of the term.

But how many people really are blind to race?

Methinks thou are being silly - being color blind to race doesn't mean that you don't notice genetic features like skin color, hair color, or eye color ... it means not ascribing significance to them, not measuring a person by them since they are of no real value for determining the qualities of a person.

Although the ascription of those traits is fairly cultural... In america we consider Barack Obama black. In Nigeria if you show someone a photo of him and ask them what his ethnicity is, they say either that he's white or that he's mixed. But according to the NPR show I heard on this, ethnic origin tends to be less important to them than other things like what languages you speak and who you will eat with. The latter kind of reminded me of high-school cliques, like, "the cool kids are too good to eat with us". So basically at least according to that particular show, the way you behave toward a given tribe is more important to them than whether you physically resemble them.

Stephen Colbert can't see race lol

True. I just think some people take the necessity for color-blindness too far, into the territory of outright negating the positive qualities about each background and culture. It can become the equivalent of saying, "Don't feel good about yourself, you're not special." The statement "We're all equal" in terms of whether we're all equally good/bad by nature makes sense, and it's different than saying, "We're all the same", which is a simplistic reduction, if taken literally. We're not exactly "the same", and that's what's cool about humanity! We're not The Borg.

Last edited by Ragtime on 23 Jan 2009, 2:25 pm, edited 4 times in total.

What I didn't know was that Obama was "half"-black.

Well, I and just one or two other members argued in another thread that Obama was half-black and half-white, but we were shouted down by the majority opposition, so it seems that everyone views him as black, period.

(BTW, I knew Obama was black the first time I saw him. And the second, but I voted for "first" anyway.)

It depends on how race is constructed. There is no doubt that one parent was African, one was European, so the 50-50 description is accurate. But because skin color is controlled by genes that display dominance, Obama's phenotype is 'black'.

^Huh? Skin color is determined by several genes under incomplete dominance. Obama is darker, but clearly not very dark.

How long have you been sitting on this information!?

DING DING DING DING DING, you win 1st prize.

But seriously, I'll bet there is someone in America who voted for Obama who actually was so out of touch that they didn't know he's black. There are some ignorant voters out there...

Ok, I used the wrong term for the genetics. But race is not a purely genetic construct - it is perceptual and social as well.

There is a perceptual dominance in terms of these genes, skin color, and race. An imperfect but illustrative analogy: If a fully "colored" is a glass of water with a lot of dye in it, and "not colored" is pure water, mixing 100 ml of the fully colored water with 100 ml of the clear will result in 200 ml that is exactly intermediate in terms of concentration (aka incomplete dominance), but which people judge to be colored.

Likewise, in map making, the perception of ink is not usually proportional to the amount of ink on a page - it is more of an S shaped curve. A little extra pigment doesn't have much effect on how dark people see something that is light, but after a threshold, there is a steep rise, and around 90% ink, a person loses the ability to distinguish between really dark and completely dark.

This is reflected in many of the traditional 'tests' for blackness - the paper bag test, the one-drop test, etc. In that sense, African genes are more dominant in determining race as it is commonly constructed.

Of course, all of these rules and perceptions are unscientific, but they have also been a social reality that powerfully structure the way people have been allowed to live. We cannot talk about race perceptions in America purely in terms of genetics, when it is a cultural phenomena based on unscientific beliefs and values.

Obama is biracial with a black father and a white mother. If you want to call him any "color" you can call him "caramel" or "olive" I guess. I think it's so funny that people keep referring to Obama being "black". He's just as white as he is black!

That's not really true. He lived in the USA in the black community and was treated as a black man in society. For all practical purposes, he's black. There isn't a black person in America that doesn't have some mixture of African and European genes, due to widespread rapes of slave women.

The last sentence isn't quite true; immigration from say Africa means that the population who comes directly from Africa is exceeding 800K. The first sentence is also suspect, as African immigrants and successive generations all earn and accomplish more than the established black populations (for example, I've heard that African immigrants actually have the highest highschool graduation rates of any immigrant group). There is a fairly clear divide between the two, and it is disingenuous to automatically associate the two groups (and I've heard some immigrant blacks who have not so nice things to say about established black populations). Furthermore, there is a very real perception among many, white and black, that Obama is mixed racial rather than black.

On the immigrant v native front, I think it is most appropriate to say there are two very different "blacks".