The Simplification of Barack Obama

I don't like it when I hear Barack Obama referred to as "black." To me he is a black person and a white person at the same time. As a person who has a Filipino mother and a white father, I find it very difficult to think of myself as one race or another. Race is more than how you look to another person. If anything, race should be more about how you look to yourself. When a person thinks of their life experiences, they can think about the relatives they grew up with and the foods they ate and the places they visited and the values cherished in their culture. These things make up race as well.

Growing up in a mixed-race household can be confusing for different reasons. I never had the problem (though I have heard about it) of not being "white enough" or "Filipino enough" to others. My relatives on both sides have always been very loving and accepting. But as a kid, I didn't really know how to explain "what I was" to other kids. They expect a simple answer and my answer wasn't that. ("You see, my dad met my mom when he was in the Peace Corps in the 60s...") As a kid, I did want a simple answer too. I would ask my mom, "What race am I? I don't want to be 'other.' I just don't." She had no simple answer for me either.

Eventually as I got older, I realized some things. I was especially specialized - half-white, half-Filipino; Catholic mom, Jewish dad. I didn't have a natural cohort of people who were just like me. A different strategy emerged - I would walk around comfortably among many different kinds of people. This came easy because, due to my diverse background, I spent time among many different kinds of people. My inherent differences made me different to other people but it also made them different to me. My unending curiosity made other people so interesting to me. And I know one thing that breaks the ice with strangers is to show an interest in them.

I relate to Barack Obama in that he seemed to have the confusion as a kid that I had. His parents came from vastly different backgrounds like my parents did. Mr. Obama said his grandmother opened up to him to say that prejudice still lingered in her thoughts. It must be jarring when a person from a previously unknown country (his dad from Kenya, my mom from the Philippines) is introduced into the family. I do know that whatever reservations existed when my mom entered my dad's family were gone as soon as they got to know my mom. (And definitely by the time they tasted her cooking.) I will not say I am a Barack Obama supporter yet but I do like how he seems to fit in everywhere. Probably because he comes from everywhere.

Barack and I have benefited from having many different kinds of relatives. We both have traveled to our respective ancestral homelanda. We ate different kinds of foods and learned about various religions. All these things define our race. I am Filipino and white. He is black and white.