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Originally Posted by pbradley
The man is black. The man is also white. To prioritize his blackness over white, one would legitimize the one-drop rule which holds that anyone who is cross between white and non-white is non-white. Thus, whiteness is pure and anything else is a contamination, which is by definition a racist concept. Obama is a black man and that cannot not be denied, but nor can his whiteness. One drop of white blood cannot deny his blackness and one drop of black blood cannot deny his whiteness but what is most dissatisfying of this either/or is that blood is red. Dignity comes from something more than pigment and cannot not be destroyed by racism, reverse or otherwise.
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yes, in the context of racism in America, mixed race folk should claim their blackness over their whiteness, but not in the derogatory context of the one-drop system, but in the opposite affect, to affirm the black identity, rather than deny or hide it. See, before the emergence of "say it loud" black nationalism, mixed folk spent their time trying to pass, denying their black heritage, and that is a damned shame to the black people who struggled to preserve their own identity across generations.
Barack Obama is black, to say anything else is to hide his blackness and affirm his white status for selfish gain. I say it again with no apologies, the man is black, and there is dignity in that by itself.