It seems we agree that race itself is a cultural code with no stable biological referent. So it follows that racial essentialism is nothing but a particularly narrowly encoded kind of cultural essentialism. This is what it means to say that race is ’socially constructed’, just like all of our other knowledge.

Categories can be open (complex, contingent, overlapping) or closed. Essentialisms are closed categorical systems that work by making imperial claims (stereotypes) about what characterizes the members of the class, who’s in and who’s out, and what that’s taken to mean about them.

Again, once ‘black’ gets disconnected from the visual or genetic markers of race, the power/knowledge game changes and folks who want to use categorization as an empowerment strategy are thrown back on more immediately cultural essentialisms. Pinning ‘black’ to ‘ghetto’ is just that kind of move.

Since we agree on how categories operate I’m not sure why you’d want to deny the Obamas their whiteness, if they so chose. We let people decide to be Native American with far less foundation, and more power to them. Whiteness is no narrower than blackness as a rich subset of Americanness, which of course we all share.

I would not call the Obamas culturally white. Rather they are culturally American, which they do claim. Just because American culture is dominated by many things that dominate white culture does not make it equivalent—”white culture” carries a narrowness that American culture does not.

I always categorize and classify everything. I’m happy when people understand that general categories embrace complex and contingent characteristics, and may be overlapping.

I suppose I’m an identity anarchist. I see the power/knowledge leverage in identity categories, but I’m happy anytime it gets more difficult to fit complex human beings into these procrustean beds.

The confusion here is that that doesn’t apply to the Obamas. They ARE really black. That’s what I mean by afro-puffs and cornrows in the white house (my post was a bit telegraphic as well)—those are signs of black culture, regardless of Obama being half-white and the daughters a quarter-white. Black church for 20 years, black wife, black call-and-response style, living (previously working) on the segregated south side of chicago—Obama is black, irrelevant of white mother. (We can throw in black music and basketball as reinforcing that, though not sufficient in themselves). (Now, could a biologically white person with all those characteristics be considered black? Not in America today, but it would be the test of the de-coupling that you desire.) My problem with my students is that the only sign of black culture that they recognize is the ghetto thug blackness of hip-hop culture.

Now, there’s also an argument that having dark skin in the US makes you black. That is, that living as a black man, facing the racial attitudes and prejudices of the US, is a common experience that makes the transracially adopted child black regardless of upbringing. That sort of mixes the cultural and biological markers of blackness—it’s a different path to blackness than Obama’s, and a more controversial one.

My own genetic heritage is (or includes) Scottish; but having grown up in eastern Pennsylvania I’m about as culturally Scottish as Barack and Michelle. This means that I’m not really Scottish, nor can I make myself so by wearing a kilt. It’s in this sense that it’s appropriate to say that the Obamas maybe aren’t really black, black being a culture not a race (since races don’t really exist except as cultural constructs anyway).

The only way to make them really black is to insist on the racialization of the category, like saying that my one or more drops of Celtic blood and my freckles make me Scottish no matter what; or to suppose that there is some common experience that everyone with that skin has had and everyone without it has not, like the oppression I have no doubt experienced as a colonized subject of the British Empire. Um, or not.

Otherwise, we’ll need to start to get solid with genetically African people becoming unblack just like genetically Celtic people become unScottish.

These are things that Stuart Hall and Anthony Appiah have said in contesting the essentialisms of racial identity ascription, I’m just trying to think them through in the Obama context.

In my view this should be encouraged. The more we decouple cultural blackness from recent African genes, the more the discourse is deracialized.

At this point “Black” is a floating signifier marked by the usual play of judgments characteristic of stigma and stigma management. Rather than jump into that with old/new ways of valorizing, claiming and disclaiming the sign, I’d like to see us get beyond good and evil by noting the contingency of all of it.