I feel that I can relate to Obama - because really he's "bi-racial"; whatever that really means. I too have one black parent and one white. I wonder if he's felt the same things that I have in the course of my relatively short life:
- How does HE identify himself?
- How much has he struggled explaining his ethnicity; often to strangers who feel that they have the right to ask simply because you look different (not quite black, obviously not white)?
- At what point in his life did he become truely comfortable with how he defines himself?
I wonder if things would have been different if his wife wasn't black and therefore his children weren't black... Would be still be described in the same way? I noticed a magazine cover, I think it may have been People, with a close up of the Obama family and thought to myself "he looks a lot darker than he actually is... and his wife and children also look darker..." Maybe he's happy to be identified by the majority as black - maybe it's eased some of his own identity issues.
I have often felt that I don't really belong anywhere - not really with my white German family, nor with my black Papua New Guinean family... I'm always looked at as different. But to tell you the truth, I feel more accepted by my black family...
I now answer the question, again often from strangers, about my "background" with one simple answer - I am Canadian, born, raised, and proud. Not that I forsake my roots nor ignore my cultural upbringings (both German and Mundugamore), but because it's easier and true! I think that as my generation ages and the next comes that this response will become more accepted...
