Just yesterday during my 'Race, Ethnicity, Class, & Gender in American Cities' graduate course, I brought up the exact discussion that New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wrote about on his blog today, regarding the issue of referring to Barack Obama as 'black' or 'biracial'.Assuming Obama wins the presidential election, I think the public dialogue surrounding this particular topic will grow over the next several months, as the intersection of race and national political representation will have advanced to a new level (not to mention global political representation, as Obama would represent the first ever non-white leader of a western democracy).
My individual perspective is that the issue of racial identification is far from black and white (pun heavily intended), with personal, biological, historical, and societal components all shaping the way individuals and collective groups racially identify themselves. Barack Obama may personally identify most strongly as black, white, or biracial (based on his life experiences), while biologically he is biracial, historically he would likely be considered black, and our present society (in terms of the descriptive narrative of his public life and professional career) has largely characterized him as black. Again, a very complex, multifaceted discussion that I think we'll be talking about a lot more over the coming months and possibly even years.
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