Tags

Joe Biden on Black and White

Joe Biden was quoted in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago (emphasis added):

"I'm going to say something presumptuous," Biden said to me. "The reason I've been relatively successful is that I have never questioned the motive of other senators, and that's instinctively Barack. Barack doesn't start off, 'Well, you disagree, you must be a, you know, an S.O.B. or you must not care about the poor or you're sexist or you're racist or you're a whatever.' He doesn't think that way." Biden continued, veering slightly into stream-of-consciousness, "I think it comes from a guy who is, you know, who's half white and half black. You know, this idea – he is a black man because society won't let him be anything else. But he's as much his mother's child as he is his father's child. And here's a guy raised in an environment that was relatively normal in the sense that there was no—he wasn't able to be squirrelled away somewhere, or he didn't live in a homogeneous neighborhood where he was part of the homogeneity. You know what I mean?"

That's a pretty simple story, and a compelling one.

More on Joe Biden on Black and White…

A penguin president

There's been some chatter recently about how Barack Obama isn't really black. The claim is that he's basically a privileged white guy.

I've a proper problem with that, and my basic difficulty is with a classification that is so damn crude.

Why try and jam Obama into one of the pigeon-holes of being exclusively white or black, but never both? I'm sure a large part rests with the media, in wanting a story that is simple to tell; I fear that a greater part is playing on America's more fragmented, near segregated culture when it comes to colour. Growing up as a kid with a mixed background made me feel no less British. I have a great love of Irish and Indian culture, but they aren't quite home to me. I'm not sure America, or perhaps just public identity there, allows such a tick-all-that-apply approach to cultural identity. I'm pretty sure living in London makes that much easier, which is why it is home now.

I hope people start the more nuanced conversation about Obama. He is black and white. He could be their first penguin president.