Out of the Closet: Yes, I Am Biracial

I never told my wife.  My kids did not know.  My lifelong friends had no inkling. In fact, not until the last several days did I accept the simple truth that I am biracial.

So how did I discern my dual racial heritage?  As a typically race-naïve former white man, I deferred to a putative race expert: Barack Obama, the guy who subtitled his autobiography, A Story of Race and Inheritance.

In the Obama book, I learned the necessary and sufficient elements that determine racial identity.   Barack explained that he had a black father and a white mother.  With impeccable logic and persuasive narrative, he led me page by page through a narcissistically obsessive journey to the inevitable conclusion that he is a black man.  Like a veritable racial Einstein, through painstaking inferential, deductive analysis, Barack had discovered the counterintuitive fact that in order to be black a person need only have one black parent—satisfying one-half of the racial criteria proves sufficient to balance the entire racial identity equation.

Barack Obama’s insights started my feeble mind whirling, racially introspecting like never before.  As I obsessed about the fact that I had a white father and a white mother, the obvious finally hit me: I am biracial.  Why?  Before Obama, I mistakenly had presumed that a black person is one who had two black parents, as opposed to a biracial person, like Barack, who had one black and one white parent. 

After reading Obama, I know that in racial matters, half a parental inheritance is as good as the whole thing.  The genetic formula goes something like this:  I, Barack Obama, was born one black parent short of the full black complement, but I choose to be black, not biracial. 

If Barack is black but only satisfies half the criteria for being black, I am biracial for the same reason; that is, I satisfy half the parental inheritance of a black and white biracial person: I was born one black parent short of being biracial, and since half a racial inheritance is as good as the whole inheritance, I choose to be biracial, not white.

Sound crazy.  Sure is.  Race in 21^st Century America is analogous to anti-Darwinism in the early 20^th Century.

You probably recall something of the famous Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925 during which Bryan, a rabid anti-evolutionist, squared off against Clarence Darrow, a famous criminal defense lawyer.   Bryan and Obama share several similarities: Like Obama, Bryan was a gifted orator and a liberal, Progressive Democrat.  Like Obama, Bryan “truly believed” in his heart that he was right, and that was enough for him.  Like Barack Obama, William Bryan ignored biological and other scientific data inconveniently at odds with his beliefs; his self-evident truth required no empirically supportive data.  And like Barack, William promoted legislation to force-feed his irrationality down the throats of the American people.

William Jennings Bryan could not imagine a God who used evolution to enact his will.  Bryan had framed evolution as an either-or: religion versus biological science, humanity either had resulted from an act of God or from a satanic naturalistic blunder.  Either religion or science, nothing in between; Darwin’s Theory was ipso facto blasphemy. 

And so it is with Obama: either or, white or black with nothing in between, no half-steps.  As a 21^st Century William Jennings Bryan, Barack Hussein Obama approaches his racial identity with evangelical fervor.  Obama wants to be black to fulfill the fanciful dreams that he believes he inherited from his father.  Only one inconvenient complication: he is half white.  How troubling, to be bi-racial. His solution is to employ racially dichotomous thinking, reasoning that since he is not all white, he must be all black. 

By adhering to the half-is-whole rule, Barack silences his biracial identity demons sufficiently to live out his heroic race-based fantasies.  Moreover, he reinforces his racial delusion and insufficient black credibility by seeking likeminded racial extremists who share his identity-oriented delusional system.

Barack’s anti-biracial battle has been a life-long, consuming preoccupation.  To cite merely one example, consider the following excerpt from Obama’s autobiography: “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.”
  
Unfortunate for him, Barack Obama’s biracial hide and seek never has worked.  He lives a life dogged by a pervasive national black identity neurosis.  For instance, at the May 2009 White House Correspondents' Association dinner, African American comedian Wanda Sykes exclaims, "The first black president!  I'm proud to be able to say that. That's unless you screw up. And then it's going to be, 'What's up with the half-white guy?'"

To Sykes, mocking biracials is great sport.  Other black identity slavemasters, however, are deadly serious, such as those who excoriated Tiger Woods when he expressed discomfort at being called black rather than the multi-racial person who he is.  The identity slavemasters mock and ostracize non-conforming “mixed” persons, calling them Uncle Tom, Sell-out, or Not-Black-Enough. 

Biracial people, who consistently, unapologetically identify themselves as such, literally embody our nation’s hope for real racial reconciliation.  Down to the cellular level, they are living testaments to racial equality and harmony.  They are not either-or.  They are not half of anything.  They simply are who they are, persons with a black and white parent. 

Our country needs a modern Clarence Darrow to take on President Obama so as to dispel the either-or, half-is-whole racial identity standard and to replace it with an attitude brave enough to celebrate the biological reality of bi-racials and multi-racials.  Even if Clarence comes along, however, I do not expect a quick fix.  Darrow did lose the Scopes Trial.

As one uniquely qualified to initiate and lead a national dialogue about biracial identity, President Obama still has an opportunity to become an All-American racial hero.  In Navy Seal-like fashion, he should conduct search and destroy missions to ferret out and eliminate the double standards, double speak, and double binds that racial terrorists employ daily to poison black-white interpersonal relations.  Barack can initiate the assault by resolutely and consistently proclaiming his self not black, not white, but black and white.  In order to do so, Obama first would need to set aside his narcissistic, dreams-from-my father fantasies, a most improbable action.

So until Barack Hussein Obama and his racially divisive and duplicitous supporters overcome their systemic racial hypocrisy, I will remain one of the approximately 4,856,136 biracial and multi-racial Americans quietly campaigning for justice.  Do you think that Eric Himpton Holder, Jr., our race-absorbed Attorney General, will find a class-action biracial identity civil rights case worthy of federal investigation?