Jane Hortelano
Pewaukee, WI
This is a question that first occurred to me years ago when I met a friend’s future husband and sister-in-law. The children of a white mother and African-American father, it seemed to me that these sibling differed in their self-perception: I believe that he saw himself as mixed race, while she thought of herself as black. I wondered how this could be and for the first time realized that a mixed race individual had a choice to make, and not just on a census form. (And I think it’s an important choice because these differences in self-definition likely have a significant influence on the way people perceive and experience the world.)
Fast forward to 2007-8 when then-Senator Obama was seeking the Presidency. Like the sibling pair above he is the son of a white mother and African father, and by that time I had become the mother of a mixed race (Asian/white) son. I see my son as mixed race, and was therefore excited by the possibility of a mixed race President. What better role model for a young boy?
But that is when the question of external vs. internal definition raised itself again. Whereas I perceived President Obama as mixed race – and genetically speaking, he clearly is – he defines himself as African-American. It’s hard to describe what I first felt about this: confused, disappointed, maybe even a little personally injured that his white mother seemed to be getting short shrift? I struggled for a long time to reconcile my perception of Barack Obama with his own. It took me several months, but I finally came to accept his own definition of himself as America’s first black President, and also of his freedom to do so.
