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  Michelle Obama, black like me | Dayo Olopade |
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 | Reported by guardian.co.uk
on Friday, 16 October 2009
(on October 16, 2009) |
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Focusing on the first lady's ancestry is part of an American obsession with slavery that we need to leave behindI have been travelling in Turkey this past week.
In this ancient, modern nation, men at bazaars and on the road have taken to chanting after me: "Mrs Obama, Mrs Obama - Mrs Obama!" To the casual observer and to some in our company, this seemed like a particularly bold illustration of racism or, at best, aggressive racial profiling.
Do foreigners think all black people are the same?Such was the question raised when the world found out last week that the real Michelle Obama's great-great-great grandmother was a slave, and that her great-great-great grandfather was a white man.In a nation of immigrants, such a revelation should not be outrageous.
After all, Obama's husband, though universally accepted as the first African-American US president, still has family ties to white American politicians like James Madison and Dick Cheney.
Michelle is merely the latest famous entrant to the club.This bit of history, however, uncovered by the New York Times in conjunction with a professional genealogist, has revived the long-running debate about the "one drop rule".
Originally a symptom of early American paranoia about racial miscegenation, the one drop rule specifies that any individual with black blood is deemed black.
Thus Michelle Obama, like her husband, is not supposed to be white.And yet there he is, bi-racial Dolphus Shields, in residence on Michelle's chromosomes, providing the black first family with a little more whiteness.
Again, this is nothing new.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr (who edits the magazine for which I write) finds that "fully one third" of the overwhelmingly black NBA is at least 30% white.
What's more, he writes: "It is one more corroboration that the social categories of 'white' and 'black' are and always have been more porous than can be imagined, especially in that nether world called slavery."Indeed, harping on Michelle Obama's slave ancestry is part of an American obsession with slavery and origins that only scratches the surface of how race and colour play out in domestic and global culture.
The juicier part of the story unfolds today.The notion of the one-drop rule and the spectrum of blackness it has created has led to a divisive social reality.
In previous decades, women with skin darker than a paper bag were discouraged from joining certain black sororities at American universities.
Chris Rock's current film, Good Hair, exposes the latent cultural desire for those drops of black blood to stay hidden.
Indeed, colourism is pervasive in countless societies, from Argentina to India.Like Obama, I was raised a young girl with dark skin on Chicago's South Side - but the similarities begin and end there.
The first lady has white ancestry - the product of slavery and a quintessentially American violence.
I am Nigerian, on both sides, as far back as the microscope can see.
But by dint of our colouring, we are indistinguishable in the eyes of American race politics.There is a certain solidarity in this blanket of blackness that nearly 20% of America wears every day.
Though a first-generation American, I share a silhouette with some passersby who are Dominican, black British or "just black" (an in-term used within African-American circles).
But it can also be trying.
The president himself has spoken of having trouble catching a cab on the darkened streets of New York.Before she was part-white, Michelle could have been wholly Nigerian - a fact that "one drop" thinking ignores.
And so we must abolish it - not because slavery and segregation aren't interesting, but because they're irrelevant.
In these days of fused and fallen barriers of class, race and nationality, race is more than ever a purely aesthetic signifier.
How we look says both less and more about who we are.And, whereas our shared skin tone was once a reason to work the fields or scrub floors, Obama's colouring is rapidly becoming part of a global vernacular that has more to do with political interaction and cultural familiarity than with tracing origins.
Rather than looking back, her ordinary yet complex heritage now speaks to the future, saying - like her husband's Nobel peace prize - that America is back.
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