How Obama Changed How I View My Identity: Hyphen Mag

Quoted via Hyphen Magazine:

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In 2000, nearly 7 million Americans embraced their multiracial identity by checking more than one racial category in the US Census. Many predict the number will grow in the 2010 census, noting that of interracial births have more than tripled since the ’70s.

But there was a shift during the 2008 presidential campaign when candidate Barack Hussein Obama, whose mother is white and father is black Kenyan, repeatedly told the media that he viewed himself not as biracial, but as black. "I identify as African American — that's how I'm treated and that's how I'm viewed,” Obama said in a 2007 interview. I'm proud of it."

At first, I was perturbed that Obama insisted on using what American Chica author and Washington Post book editor Marie Arana has described as outdated language. “Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black. We call him that — he calls himself that –because we use dated language and logic.” more