I'm waiting for the next Obama event to get underway, but in the meantime, I've been meaning to call attention to several recent articles about mixed race people and relationships. While all of them use Obama as a hook for the article, they reflect on a greater subject that gets little attention. How often we forget that it was only 40 years ago that the Supreme Court threw out a Virginia statute barring whites from marrying non-whites in Loving v. Virginia. And it was only in 2000 that people were allowed to identify as two or more races in the Census.
Much of the debate about Barack Obama's racial heritage seems to focus on whether he's too black, or whether being part black makes him all black (holdovers from the days of the "one drop" rule), or whether he's not black enough, which unfortunately denies his identity as well as that of at least 7.3 million Americans. That may be only three percent of the country, but it's significant, considering how small it must have been back before people were even allowed to identify as such. The last Census also found 3.1 million interracial couples, making up 6 percent of all married couples --a number which is also growing. It's unfortunate that it has taken a presidential candidate to draw attention to presence of mixed race Americans, but it's also wonderful that he has. Perhaps one day we'll live in a country where it is possible not just for a presidential candidate to be black, but permissible for him or her -- and everyone else -- to be everything they are.
--Kate Sheppard
