Week 9 Lily Trang A04

During this week's reading of Barack Obama as the post racial candidate for a post racial America perspectives from Asian America and Hawaii, by Jonathan Okamura, this article is explains the post racialism during Obama's election and even after. Barack is seemed to represent as the "post-racial candidate", after all this time, racial discrimination still continues to this day. To Asian-Americans, Obama states I am one of you, showing that he understands the Asian American cultures and he personally sees himself as a Pacific Islander due to living in Hawaii during his childhood. Barak Obama is used as an example of post racialism of color blindness and multiculturalism within the United States of America. It is very surprising to me when Jonathan Okamura stated, "even some Whites, expressed their liberal colour blindness, were said to think of Obama not as a black man but just as a man." It is a good progress within our country especially after Obama's campaign to push aside just the race and look at the bigger picture. We are starting to enter a post-racial transition where individuals can look above just race. I am an Asian American, and do believe Obama is allowed to call himself one of "us", he grew up in Indonesia and learned the customs and practices that Asian Americans are grown up to learn. He learns to embrace the Asian community resulting in nearly 66% of Asian American votes contributing to his election. This solidarity between Pacific Islanders, Asian Americans, African Americans, and for all races show that there is post-racialism in the US. However, this is just for the United States of America, all around the world there is a still reality and reoccurring racism around us just fighting to have racial equality.


Question: Would you accept an individual as your nationality if they have grown up to learn about the customs and practices you do? Disregarding if their blood, DNA or ancestry does not contain the same nationality?

Jonathan Y. Okamura (2011) Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a post-racial America: perspectives from Asian America and Hawai‘i, Patterns of Prejudice, 45:1-2, 133-153, DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.563159