race and obama

bumping this post back up because i want it to have another day or two before i move on...

i am a bi-racial american. not a single week goes by without someone stopping to ask me, "where are you from?" and even though i know that it's not the answer they want, i say, "i'm from chicago." and then they'll say, "what are you?" and i say, "american." and that's not the answer they want either. what they want to know is that i'm half chinese.

balding ex-work boyfriend once told me, "you're not a minority. you're white. you act white."

the comment was so wrong/ignorant/pathetic on so many levels that i still don't really know where to begin. at the time, i said, "who the fuck are you? who are you to tell me what my ethnic background is?" and by "act white" i think he meant that i don't speak english with the accent so often parodied (something that he had to remind his racist ex liz every time she made racist comments about me and impersonated whatever accent she thought i had). for all i know, he could have had a more racist bent: i'm white because i am educated and cultured.

but i was raised by my mother and my grandparents. and they were white. but i was eating with chopsticks before i could hold a fork. but because my father took off when i was so young, i lack the kind of cultural awareness he would have instilled.

so being bi-racial carries it's own set of problems. which brings me to barack obama. and all this utter nonsense being written and the shit being spouted in interviews on national television to talk about how obama isn't black. at least, they seem to say, not in the way that "matters." because he isn't the descendant of slaves in america, he doesn't count.

i have been the victim of racist remarks and i'll bet a million dollars that over the course of Obama's life, so has he. and i'll bet that white supremacists consider obama worthy of their hate. and i'll bet that there are people, whether or not they'd say it out loud, who won't vote for obama because of the color of his skin (or for hillary because of her gender). and so i don't understand why black americans would try to differentiate themselves from the man who could very well represent a great step towards what all minorities claim they want: equality.

then there are the white idiots on the other side of the aisle: he's clean, eloquent, and non-threatening for a black man. i think the country is regressing before my very eyes in terms of racial equality here.

why is it when a vast part of the the country is trying to make the statement that race and gender don't matter (we haven't had strong presidential contenders as women or as blacks EVER, and now to have them at the same time!) that blacks AND whites are making an issue over obama's race? isn't it enough we have right-wingers (and fox news network) trying to convince everyone that he's a terrorist because his middle name is hussein and trying to re-write history to put him at a terrorist camp preschool?!

but as always, jon stewart, my love, has his two cents.

"right now only 20% of black people support obama. that's bad. but is it bad enough for him to win? it works like this, for every three black votes you get you scare away five white votes. do the math. black support is only worth 3/5ths as much as white support."