Obama win stirs mixed feelings in biracial community

Dec. 29, 2008

Story by Meha Ahmad

When Angela Pham looks at President-Elect Barack Obama, she sees a black president.

Pham, 22, who is half Vietnamese, half white, says Obama doesn’t truly represent other biracials, citing a speech about race given in March, where Obama focused chiefly on the black community.

Pham said she’s seen Obama reach out to the black community and wishes the president-elect spoke out more to the biracial and multi-racial voters.

Raised by her white mother, Pham doesn’t have strong Vietnamese features. She may consider herself “more white” but identifies as biracial and checks “biracial” or “other” on government forms and college applications.

She knows what it’s like to be raised by the “white side” of the family like Obama, who was raised by his white mother and later by his maternal grandparents, so she wants to be able to better relate to him.

Richard Schaefer, a professor of black world studies and racial attitudes at DePaul University, said racial identity in American society is socially rather than biologically constructed.

“Everyone self identifies in different ways. Sometimes they identify themselves as biracial or multiracial,” Schaefer said. “But typically in our society, people who are partially African-American or Asian are seen as [completely] African-American or Asian.”

Pham, a magazine freelance writer from Charleston, Ill., said she sometimes forgets that Obama is half white.

“I think I always perceived him as black, even though I know his background,” Pham said.

Obama identifies as a black man. In his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father,” Obama discusses his struggle to find his racial identity and goes on to classify himself as a black man.

Pham said she thinks the media has also played a big role in her perception of Obama’s racial make-up. Post-election, headlines across the nation and around the globe rejoiced in Obama’s victory as the “first black president” rather than showcasing him as the first biracial president.

“I think it would empower the multicultural community if more emphasis was placed on the fact that Obama was biracial,” Pham said. “[But] I think it has really helped the black community more than anyone.”

Tom Smith, an expert on race and demographics at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, said in the past, many communities didn’t embrace individuals’ multi-heritage backgrounds.

“In American racial and ethnic identification, the general thought has been to pick one dominant identification and kind of forget about or underreport the others,” Smith said.

But having a biracial president paves the way for others to identify with more than just one part of their make-up as a result of what Smith calls the multicultural community’s own “Obama Effect.”

“It’s going to make that multiple-identification more salient to people,” Smith said. “You’re going to get more people reporting… the racial or ethnic complexity that makes up their background rather than simplifying it.”

Not everyone in the biracial community feels disenfranchised. Several local biracial voters said they voted for Obama because seeing a biracial candidate win the presidency stirred up pride in their multicultural backgrounds.

Ukaisha Alamin is half black and part Native American, white and African. She said having a president-elect with as diverse a background as hers makes her feel proud and inspired.

She hopes her multiracial 5-year-old son, Hameed, will not always be considered an “other” but be able to embrace his diverse heritage.

She isn’t holding her breath, though.

“Hopefully there will be a ripple effect from Obama’s [win],” Alamin said. “But obviously it’s not going to happen overnight.”

Schaefer said having a biracial leader with as diverse a background as Obama’s appeals to and inspires not only blacks and whites, but other minorities. He has talked to many individuals in the immigrant community who favor Obama because he is the son of an immigrant.

“You will see in the complex story of Barack Obama something that appeals to you,” Schaefer said.