Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Blessing

The New York Times
2008-06-18

Francis Wilkinson, Executive Editor
The Week

Being from an interracial marriage has shaped Obama’s political stance.

Far from the storied hollows of Appalachia, and well before the Rev. Jeremiah Wright lit up the cable news channels or the “elitist” label was fixed to Barack Obama’s lapel right where his flag pin ought to have been, a group of older white voters drew a firm line on his candidacy. On Feb. 5, Mr. Obama prevailed by just 10,000 votes in Missouri, a general election swing state. His victory margin was cramped by the fact that he lost white voters over age 60 by nearly 40 percentage points, 67 percent to 28 percent. And it had nothing to do with bowling.

It’s possible that older white people just don’t know where Barack Obama is coming from. Then again, perhaps the problem is they do. One useful gauge of racial tolerance over the years has been the percentage of Americans who approve of interracial marriage. In 1961, when Mr. Obama’s African father and white mother were married, they joined an exceedingly small and extremely unpopular minority. According to the 1960 census, of more than 40 million married couples living in the United States that year, a mere 51,000, or 0.1 percent, consisted of a black and a white. A Gallup poll from 1958, just three years before Mr. Obama was born, found that only 4 percent of white people approved of such marriages, one point greater than the poll’s margin of error.

Both racial attitudes and the frequency of interracial marriage have changed significantly since then. But approval is far from universal. A 2007 Gallup poll found that among whites over age 50, less than two thirds, or 64 percent, approve of marriage between a black person and a white person. Subtract a few points for those who were reluctant to appear intolerant on the survey, and you wind up with roughly 4 in 10 white people over age 50 refusing to support interracial marriage. It hardly seems far-fetched that voters who oppose black-white unions in the first place might have some difficulty supporting the product of such a union as their president…

As a young man, Mr. Obama recognized that he would have difficulty functioning as half white, half black in a racially polarized society. He made a choice, one predetermined to a significant degree by the color of his skin. If the wounds from that painful process and from his racially complicated youth seem to have magically healed, it’s not because he has rolled away the heavy stone of prejudice and ushered in a post-racial morning in America. It’s because Mr. Obama views public denial of his own life experience as a political imperative. To succeed, he has trained his formidable will not just on changing the future, but the past.

Read the entire essay here.