{"id":649,"date":"2008-08-28T22:17:10","date_gmt":"2008-08-29T02:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/?p=649"},"modified":"2017-02-28T20:22:56","modified_gmt":"2017-03-01T01:22:56","slug":"649","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/2008\/08\/28\/649\/","title":{"rendered":"How Do I Get to Be Black Like Obama?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barack Obama is called a lot of things. Being a candidate for President of the United States means a lot of people apply a lot of different labels, good or bad or indifferent, to categorize you and anticipate your every move.<\/p>\n

I find it interesting people use the labels “African American” or “Black” to describe him instead of “Biracial”, “Multiracial”, or “Interracial”. The frustration I dealt with for most of my life was neither being Black or White enough to be accepted as belonging. Is it a case of, “If you have even a drop of a Black blood-line, then you are Black not White?” These musing about Obama did start after a Black homeless guy downtown looked at me and stated that I didn’t understand his point because I am not Black. See, I wasn’t kidding in that not Black enough<\/a> post. By the two generation ratio of blood-lines, I am just as Black as Obama.<\/p>\n

What makes Barack African American and me not African American?<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. We both have fathers of African descent.<\/li>\n
  2. We both have mothers of European descent.<\/li>\n
  3. I at least had the influence of my father and his aunts and his cousins and my cousins to show me African culture. Barack had two White grandparents.<\/li>\n
  4. Barack’s close friends in high school and college were of African descent. My close friends during those periods were all of European descent.<\/li>\n
  5. Barack worked with and for people of African descent at the community level. I’m ecstatic just to have > 10% people of African descent in the cube area. It is new for me. I like it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This is more important to me than the politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Barack Obama is called a lot of things. Being a candidate for President of the United States means a lot of people apply a lot of different labels, good or bad or indifferent, to categorize you and anticipate your every move. I find it interesting people use the labels “African American” or “Black” to describe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[205],"tags":[252,366,3053,124,238,328,368,3097,367,92,141,389,369],"class_list":["post-649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race-racism","tag-america","tag-biracial","tag-wordpress","tag-culture","tag-friend","tag-import","tag-interracial","tag-mixed-race","tag-multiracial","tag-parents","tag-politics","tag-port","tag-president"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s1rUBW-649","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}