Anything But Black
This article about Obama’s childhood in multiracial Hawaii reminds me of what I wrote here. Hawaii (and increasingly California) could probably serve as a case study for the future black/non-black society in which we are headed. This quote says it all:
you could be anything else but a brother and have free rein of the world in Hawaii
The problem for Barack Obama - in spite of being half white - is that he probably did not look “non-black” enough to avoid racism…
Entire article below
Growing up as a young man of mixed race, Barack Obama benefited from the spirit of tolerance that defined Hawaii’s racial climate.
His childhood in the country’s idealized melting pot was far from painless, though.
As part of the islands’ small group of black Americans in the 1970s, he encountered racism and struggled to form a black identity.
Obama’s experience in Hawaii is echoed by other blacks, including some of his schoolmates, and challenges the state’s vaunted image of racial harmony.
“A big joke amongst the brothers was you could be anything else but a brother and have free rein of the world in Hawaii,” said Rik Smith, a black former schoolmate of Obama’s at Punahou, an elite private school in Honolulu. “When it comes to people of color, black people, there’s a huge amount of racism.”
In his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama, who is half black and half white, recalled a seventh grader calling him a “coon” and a tennis pro who joked that his color might rub off. One person wanted to touch his hair, and he was asked whether his father, a native of Kenya, ate people. An assistant basketball coach used a racial epithet in referring to black players.
Obama, who attended Punahou on scholarship, was among a handful of black students at the K-12 school.
In a 1999 essay for the Punahou alumni magazine, Obama wrote: “Hawaii’s spirit of tolerance might not have been perfect or complete. But it was
Filed under: Race
Although I was raised in a multicultural setting— I was told not to get too comfortable with it. It’s not that she didn’t want me to interact with other non-Blacks/non Americans there. She didn’t want us to be naive about the wrong understanding of multiculturalism.
The biggest mistake that people have about it is that it always breeds multicultural thinking. People think that just because they live in a multicultural place that everybody is open minded and is accepting of them. Think about a multicultural city like London, England for example. It is a very multicultural city that also boasts one of the highest rate( at 51 percent) of interracial couples in the world, yet racism, like everywhere else, still exists there. A couple of years ago a young Black boy was killed because he was dating a White girl. Nobody would have expected that incident to exist in the country.
Being a Georgian, a Southerner,people always expect for me to have plenty of deep tragic racial stories of my life( Jim Crow like stories..). Mostly, I have had positive relationships with the people, but I wasn’t some racially sheltered woman who didn’t know what racism was and would be lying to say that I’ve never experienced it( and most likely will continue to experience it to the day I die). Overall, I’m still in my multicultural environment and it’s all good.
I’m perplexed with people who have those kinds of thoughts.They are judging the physical side of it., without knowing the reason behind it. I remembered reading the origins behind the multiculturalism in New York City. Most of the immigrants that arrived on Ellis island came there with a purpose, and it wasn’t about getting together singing “We Are The World”. The people were thinking about their well being and to provide for their families. Most times when immigrants came there, they often wanted to live a community of people who would understand their culture. It’s pretty much like that today.
True multiculturalism consist of people having the purpose of wanting to be together, respecting each other as human beings and having positive interactions with each other. It doesn’t matter how many different groups of people you live around, if they are not respecting you because of your race,then it isn’t true diversity.