"Halfrican-American"? Since When?

As I was persuing CafePress.com, preparing to spend inordinate amounts of money on Barack Obama gear, I came across a t-shirt with an illustration of our president-elect's handsome face bisected vertically, with the left half missing. The text that accompanied the image read: "Halfrican-American." I stared at this thing for about five minutes, trying to decifer its meaning. Is it something created by a person of mixed-raced origins? A hater who wants to remind us that he's not actually black but half-white? Or someone who conjured a clever phrase and just had to put it somewhere? I may never know the answer (though if you do, please, by all means, enlighten me.) All I know is that it pissed me off...a little bit.

Obama has always embraced his mixed-race heritage, and was raised primarily by white family members (including his beloved grandma, rest her soul. I'm still so sad she couldn't hang on long enough to see him win the presidency...) In a campaign where race could have been a time bomb, I applaud him for the classy way he handled the issue while at the same time being open and proud of his origins. But this t-shirt thing stirred up quite a bit of bile for me, for reasons that I can only describe as cultural inheritance.

Ever heard of the "one drop rule"? It is a sticky and complicated concept, but it originated during the late 19th century as an attempt by Southern legislators to maintain "racial purity" among whites and perpetuate the disenfranchisement of blacks in post-slavery US. The parameters of "one-drop" varied from state-to-state, but whether a person had one-eighth, one-sixteenth or one-thirtysecond black ancestry (and the rest white) by the "one drop rule" he or she was black in the eyes of the law. Not mixed, not even "mulatto," but straight up black. If you looked like a member of the Swedish volleyball team, by this rule you were still black. And of course your own sense of identity meant absolutely nothing. People who lived under these laws learned to view themselves as black whether they wanted to or not, because the legal system that enforced Jim Crow segregation never let them live otherwise without fear of "discovery."

The Supreme Court didn't declare the "one drop rule" illegal until 1967, and the concept has been used in court cases as late as the mid-80s to reclassify people from white to black no matter how they had identified or lived their lives. This "rule" remains in the lawbooks of many Southern states to this day. But regardless of the legality of such race-classification, the spirit of the "one drop rule" lives on in the collective American consciousness. People of biracial heritage read as"half-XXX" (black, Native, Asian, Latin, etc.) rather than as "half-white;" it is the "dark" part of their heritage that is called out rather than the white, which is considered to be the default race. (That is a whole other problematic notion...)

Barack Obama is a poster boy for this concept; blacks and whites and for that matter probably everyone else has completely elided his white side. He was the African-American senator from Illinois; on January 20th, 2009 (a date that can't come fast enough) he will be the first African-American president. Anyone who claims his race wasn't an issue in this election is lying or deluded by wishful thinking. It is not a coincidence that such a high percentage of first-time black voters ran to the polls because he reads black. It certainly helps that the man is brilliant and progressive and fresh, but I for one would not have been nearly as excited about an equally brilliant, progressive and fresh white candidate. Why shouldn't we claim him? Everything else in our society, from slavery to this minute, has conspired to label him black. I've never seen a single news story about him containing the words "Biracial presidential candidate Barack Obama," or "Mixed-race senator Barack Obama." Of course it's about race, damn near everything in this country is whether we like it, agree with it or not. And in this case race pretty much means black and white, because that is the specific pathology that has festered in this country for its entire history.

So all of the sudden, here comes this CafePress.com t-shirt that calls Obama "Halfrican-American." Oh really? Do you look at Barack Obama and see a half-white man? Do you look at light-complexioned black people and wonder if they're half-white, or are they just light-complexioned black people to you? You can be darn skippy that when he screws up he'll be black. What if Michelle were white? I bet he'd be even blacker in the eyes of America then.

I have already clarified that I am pleased the man ackowledges everything that he is. And if it is a person of mixed black origins who created that t-shirt, more power to you--you have every right to claim him as well. But I hope you can relate to my point of view. "One-drop" has been used to oppress and punish us (and those who consider themselves not quite "us") for decades. In this country, we have been conditioned that white + black = black. Now, in the highest office of politics in the United States, we can take the "one drop rule" and turn it on its ear, claim it as a rally to empowerment, rub it in their faces. To those old Southern lawmakers and their adherents past and present, guess what? Your president is BLACK.