A man for all racial reasons
Chicago Trinbune
by Clarence Page
August 22, 2004
Without even trying, Obama seems to have touched off the biggest national debate over race labeling that I can recall since the Census Bureau announced that in 2000 everyone would be allowed to check more than one racial box for the first time. About 2.5 percent of those who checked “black” checked at least one other box too, which was about twice as many as census officials expected.
And that was the nation’s biggest race-labeling dust-up since Tiger Woods called himself a “Cablinasian” (for Caucasian, black, American Indian and Asian) on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
That’s fine for Tiger Woods, if it works for him. I have always believed that people should be entitled to call themselves what they want to call themselves. You have nothing if you don’t have the right to define yourself. In fact, a healthy debate over racial labels ultimately moves us toward the cosmic truth that racial labels are meaningless.
But most of us still live in the world where, as author James Baldwin once wrote, “Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.”
Page is arguing that Obama is “black” because he “looks black.” Does Mostafa Hefny “look black”? The U.S. government claims that he is “white” because all North Africans are “white.”
http://www.cnn.com/US/9707/16/racial.suit/
What about Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4661093/
Would Page admit that everyone who “looks white” is indeed “white” because that’s how the man on the street would see them? Why not? Page’s column only repeats the same old racial hypocrisy.