Why is Barack Obama the “Black” Candidate?

My mother called today to make sure I’m still alive, and was thus subjected to the same sad fact as my blog: in preparation for qualifying exams, all I think about is culture and inequality.  You might as well not even try to have a normal conversation with me; my eyes will glaze over, and I’ll either be (a) thinking about how something you said relates to culture and/or inequality, or (b) thinking about how your normal conversation is irrelevant to culture and inequality and thus irrelevant to me, period.

Anyway, my mother luckily had something prepared to talk about that was relevant to my exams: she told me about a column in the commentary section of the local paper, written as a response to a reader who wrote in and asked why the paper always calls Barack Obama the “black candidate” when he is, more accurately, biracial.  The column itself focuses more on journalism (you can read it here, though you may need to login), but it’s a very sociological question.

I told my mother that if I were answering this reader’s question, I would point to the historical legacy of the one-drop rule, the traditional view of race in America as a black/white dichotomy, and maybe even a little bit of the Thomas Theorem and an explanation of ascriptive inequality–after all, Barack himself points out that if you look African-American in our society, people will treat you accordingly.

Orlando Patterson wrote an article addressing some of these issues for Time Magazine back in 2007, though he was writing before Obama’s success in the primaries.

Of course, this all feeds into the debates over whether or not Barack is “black enough,” another question that points to sociological issues related to the construction of race and cultural ideas about “doing” race.  I can’t tell if the reader who originally wrote into the Hartford Courant had this issue on his mind when he asked why we don’t describe Obama as biracial, or if he was just curious about why everything gets reduced to a black/white dichotomy that isn’t as objective and concrete as it seems.  At any rate, it’s an interesting question to ponder from a sociological perspective…

…and yet I’m already trailing off, because I’m thinking to myself: will I get an exam question on the social construction of Barack Obama’s race?  Probably not.  I crave the day when my entire existence is no longer directed toward one  72-hour exam period.