Humor
The Witty Side
Obama Belongs to
All of Us
By Melvin Durai
I
have a message for my African-American friends: Stop claiming Barack
Obama as one of yours. He's not one of yours. He's one of OURS. In
case you haven't checked, Obama isn't just black. He's half-black,
half-white and half-Asian. Okay, perhaps he isn't half-Asian, but
his step-father was Indonesian, he was raised partly in Indonesia,
and most of his clothes are from Asia. So don't you dare laugh when
you're driving through Chinatown and see a bumper sticker that says
"I'm Voting For Obama. He's Almost Asian!"
If you're Hispanic, you can take pride in him too. Did you know that
Obama loves tortilla chips and salsa, and he once sat through an
entire Jennifer Lopez movie? Yes, the man has gone to great pains to
discover his Hispanic side.
When they make a movie about Obama, you'll see him flying to the
White House in a cape, with people gazing up and gasping, "It's a
black man! It's a white man! It's everyman!"
Obama identified himself with the African-American community as a
young man, partly because he felt a need to belong, and that suits
everyone just fine, because we love to put people into neat
categories. But his background is quite different from most
African-Americans. After all, there aren't many African- Americans
who could organize a family reunion and harbor a slight fear that
Dick Cheney might show up.
And there aren't many
African-Americans who could fly to Africa, host a dinner party for
their extended family and have hundreds of people showing up, most
of whom are actually related to them.
Obama's late father was Kenyan and his late mother was Kansan. If
he's elected to the White House, it will be a momentous, historic
occasion, because, as everyone knows, America has never had a
Kenyan-Kansan president. Yes, he'll be America's very first K-K
president, much to the dismay of the KKK.
Obama has given credit to his white mother for raising him after his
father left, writing in his memoir that "what is best in me I owe to
her." But despite all that, it's his father's race that seems to
define him. "If you have one drop of black blood, you're black,"
society seems to say. But what if every drop of your blood is red?
Shouldn't we celebrate Obama's mixed heritage, instead of glossing
over it, instead of cutting off his mother's side?
The same can be asked about Tiger Woods. Journalists often refer to
Tiger as an African-American golfer, except in Thailand, where
journalists describe him as "the golfer whose mother is Thai."
According to Wikipedia, Tiger's late father, Earl, was half
African-American, one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Native
American, while his mother, Kultida, is half Thai, one-quarter
Chinese and one-quarter Dutch. That makes Tiger one-quarter Chinese,
one-quarter Thai, one-quarter African-American, one-eighth Native
American and one-eighth Dutch. And that makes me glad I studied
fractions in high school.
Thanks to those lessons, I've figured out that Tiger is -- drum roll
please! -- twice as much Asian as African-American. But not many
people know that. If they made a movie about him, it would be called
"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Asian."
Tiger, quite smartly, considers himself "Cablinasian" (a combination
of Caucasian, Black, American-Indian and Asian.) He's not just a
great golfer, but also a great role model, making so many people
proud, especially those in the Cablinasian community. You may not
know this, but for 10 consecutive years, they've selected him as "Cablinasian
of the Year."
Tiger has a unique genetic makeup -- and so does each of us, no
matter our racial background. Obama owes his not just to his father,
but also his mother. That's why it puzzles me that 92 percent of
blacks supported him in the Mississippi primary, but only 26 percent
of whites did.
Why such a racial divide over a candidate who's half-this and
half-that?
March 24, 2008
Melvin Durai is a Toronto-based writer and
humorist. Born in India, he grew up in Zambia and has lived in North
America since the early 1980s.His humor has appeared in dozens of
newspapers and magazines in several countries, including America, India
and Zambia. Read more of Melvin Durai's humor at
http://melvindurai.com
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I
have a message for my African-American friends: Stop claiming Barack
Obama as one of yours. He's not one of yours. He's one of OURS. In
case you haven't checked, Obama isn't just black. He's half-black,
half-white and half-Asian. Okay, perhaps he isn't half-Asian, but
his step-father was Indonesian, he was raised partly in Indonesia,
and most of his clothes are from Asia. So don't you dare laugh when
you're driving through Chinatown and see a bumper sticker that says
"I'm Voting For Obama. He's Almost Asian!"