For this
week’s reading I read “Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a
post-racial America: perspectives from Asian America and Hawai’i” written by Jonathan
Y. Okamura. An interesting thing I learned from reading this article was how
Obama considered himself as a Pacific Islander. I found it interesting that
even though he had no Pacific Islander ancestry he considered himself Pacific
Islander due to him being born and raised in Hawai’i. However, some people then
began questioning if he was black enough because he had a white mother and he
grew up in Hawai’i where there isn’t a large population of African Americans. Because
of these things even though some people thought we were in some post-racial world
because Obama won it seemed that the issue of race became more prominent. This
is because people were putting him in a box where he had to act some type of
way and if he didn’t act how they expected it was considered weird like in the
cases explained above. In addition to this I think there’s a problem with him
considering himself Pacific Islander. I say this because if it was the other
way around and an Asian person considered themselves black they would get lots
of judgement and backlash for this.
Question:
Why do people only get upset when certain ethnicities identify with a race they
are not?
References:
Okamura,
J.Y. (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.
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