There are questions about Barack Obama’s “blackness” that are making me wonder about my own “yellowness.” It’s enough to make a guy go amok.
Just how yellow am I?
And let me not leave you out, dear AsianWeek reader.
In the spirit of inclusiveness, how yellow are we all?
Color questions abound.
Maybe perilously.
If in the black/white scheme of things Asian Americans have been deemed “yellow,” how yellow is yellow” Is it ever possible to be yellow enough?
Indeed, just how many shades of yellow are there? Chick-a-dee yellow? Banana yellow? Lemon yellow?
Are we even talking about — yellow?
Can and should yellowness — our skin color — even be used to define our Asian-ness?
Where in the yellow scale would a dark-skinned Bangaladeshi fit in?
Or a brownish Filipino American like me?
Off-the-scale and not Asian?
Perhaps yellow isn’t as relevant after all, since by its very nature our “Asian-ness” seems more a function of ancestral geography. And our luck with the gene pool.
Where we come from matters, but then there’s that outer wrapper that appears to count, at least superficially.
But would you feel a particular kinship to a jaundiced white person because he had the tinge of a brother?
What if he THOUGHT like you? Would that count for something? Or, is that not as binding as blood and skin?
All this from the simple act of a person of color who dares to announce he wants to be the next president of the United States.
OBAMA’S COLOR QUESTIONS
It would be nice if such an event would spark questions pertaining to policy matters.
But why be so wonky?
The color question posed from all angles is much more interesting and probing than say, whether America should have a surge in troops. That question has a definite, unwavering answer.
Send in another 21,500 troops. After you say, “No,” then what? (Of course, even that question is difficult judging from that ridiculous non-binding resolution that our Dame Pelosi is pushing forth that does nothing daring, and still allows Bush to send in his troops, anyway).
But questions like, “Is Obama too black for white America and is America ready for that?”
Or, “Is Obama too white for black America” And is that something black America would really get behind — a black American who is not a descendant of slaves and whose background is so alien from the ‘authentic’ black experience”?
Those are far more revealing questions about America, and its progress as a democratic nation.
The correct answer to both aforementioned questions, of course, is that with a white mother and a black father, Obama is multiracial.
So why do people only see black? Why does black trump?
It shouldn’t.
OBAMA AS TIGER
In that sense, Obama is your political Tiger Woods, the charismatic mixed-race person.
But no matter how many times they show Tiger’s mom, Tida, a Thai immigrant, on the 18th green ready to hug her son, the champion, does anyone ever really consider Tiger rightfully Asian American?
No, they call him black. See the mother, see how dark she is, and then they willingly go along the path of imprecision until someone calls them on it.
And I have, ever since Tiger came on the scene.
It’s as if we are stuck in the black/white spectrum, unable to shake the past to allow the new reality of diversity.
Tiger for a time mentioned he was “Cablanasian,” and has since then forgotten about it. His prodigious talent just transcends the subject. It just doesn’t matter anymore.
We aren’t to that point with Obama. If elections are like golf tournaments, we have yet to see Obama hit out of a dangerous lie to save par.
He’s yet to prove himself, so all the Obama talk hinges on his “blackness” and his whiteness, and not on his being both at the same time, equally.
There’s almost a reluctance among the “race traditionalists” to admit that in Obama’s experience — including his yellow period, growing up in America’s most Asian state, Hawai‘i — we have an ideal change agent who is at once light enough and dark enough to have some appeal to all.
Including all us yellows.
It’s not unlike the years leading up to the 2000 Census when many of the same traditionalists resisted the inclusion of a multi-race category in the nation’s count.
Ideally, being of mixed race should be self-canceling, allowing us to move on to all those issues that are supposed to matter when considering who will best lead and govern.
You know, what do we do about prescription drugs? About Social Security? About Medicare? Unfunded mandates, anyone?
But that supposes that we’re all ready to be modern and get beyond those emotional issues of race.
We aren’t.
When another presidential candidate, Sen. Joe Biden, talks about how “clean and articulate” Obama is, you know we’re not.
Biden’s mindset is probably the benign version of what many are thinking, but it’s still of the Guess Whose Coming to Dinner? generation, and shows that a real race hangover remains often clouding perceptions.
And what are modern Asian Americans thinking?
Is Obama yellow enough for us?
In the coming year, true colors should emerge.