When the race is ours.....

We have a black president, and an Hawaiian president, and an Indonesian and a partially Asian president with roots deep in Kenya as well as Kansas, who entered politics in the black neighborhoods of Chicago's South Side. All of this was brought home to me in a picture of the sharply contrasting elements and influences in Barack Obama's ethnic and cultural makeup in an article by Professor Dwight N. Hopkins of the University of Chicago Divinity School in the Christian Century magazine.

We Americans have lived under the one-drop-of-black-blood rule as a means of maintaining white supremacy from the time the first Africans were brought in chains to the new world. They and their children were designated as black as long as there was one drop of black blood in their makeup regardless of how white they may have looked.

I grew up in a western suburb of Chicago, Oak Park. Chicago was described as a thousand small towns or neighborhoods knit together and it certainly seemed that way. Called the second largest Polish city in the world, neighborhoods of almost every nationality and ethnic make up could be identified. In the midst of this kaleidoscope of many backgrounds was the stark contrast of white versus black. Blacks weren't even counted as citizens in the minds of many until after Emancipation and the end of the Civil War. We white Northerners often looked down on Southern white supremacists as blatant racists, but in practice we forced black people to stay in their own neighborhoods and turned a blind eye to their inferior schools and lack of playgrounds and social services others enjoyed from the same tax base.

The south side of Chicago had a large population of African Americans and had grown rapidly with the coming of World War II when both blacks and whites from the southern states emigrated to northern cities to work in the burgeoning defense industries. De facto segregation kept black persons in their own neighborhoods.

Professor Hopkins raises the interesting question of what race is Obama? The professor quotes Georgian Congressman John Lewis who has said that no black person who had come out of segregation and the civil rights movement could have been elected the first black president. And of course President Obama redefines what it means to be called black. His ancestors didn't come from the West African empires of long ago and therefore had no connection to the European slave trade. During the civil rights struggles Mr. Obama didn't live in the southern states but in Asia and the pacific islands. He didn't grow up in an American black church, the cradle of civil rights. He was born in Hawaii and grew up among Japanese Hawaiians, Chinese Hawaiians, Filipino Hawaiians, Pacific Island Hawaiians, Native Hawaiians and white Hawaiians. Whites are still a minority in Hawaii. Dr. Hopkinds points our that the black-white paradigm of the mainland 'did not dominate his reality.'

From age six to ten he lived in Indonesia and spoke Indonesian. He was also raised in a white environment. His Kansan mother (not from the South) reared him with the help of his white grandparents.

Yet he is our black President and is more African than most of our African American citizens. His father came here voluntarily from Kenya in east Africa as a student in 1959. Barack Obama was 22 when he moved to the South Side of Chicago and engaged in the tradition of segregation and the one-drop rule. He received three things in Chicago, a black family through marriage, a black community through his excperience of working as a community organizer, and a black church.

With the fascinating science of DNA we could all learn much of our backgrounds. Most of us today know nothing of our heritage more than three or four generations back, certainly not eight or ten and before. We have 'drops' we've never dreamed of, and are recipients of others, good or bad, who have made us who we are.

President Obama is perhaps the most 'American' of all American presidents and most like us. He is the result of the melting pot. Many years ago, long before any dream of an Obama presidency, I came to believe through my own observation and experience of the civil rights movement that the ultimate solution to the 'race issue,' so-called, would be intermarriage and the total blending of the races. I participated in civil rights activities in rather limited ways in comparison with many who were truly heroic in their willingness to sacrifice their careers as well as their own physical safety. But for all of us this election has meant a great step forward in weakening the one-drop rule.