Talk:Barack Obama/race

He is black — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.0.18.136 (talk) 23:06, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

Untitled

This is a sub-page for Talk:Barack Obama to discuss race, ethnicity, birthplace, parentage, religion, citizenship, and related matters. Please be aware that many of these are recurring discussions and/or are treated in the "FAQ" section near the top of that page.

Ancestry

The article identifies every white ethnicity of his mother yet makes absolutely no mention of his mother's Cherokee ancestry. If it's notable to consider him French it's important to mention his mother being part-Cherokee. In fact he even stated his mother's family was ashamed of the Cherokee ancestry.YVNP (talk) 08:37, 3 October 2008 (UTC)who cares

Obama is also of German descent

As historians have proved, Barack Obama ist 50 % European, English and GERMAN. This should be added to the main page. European is not a race, English (Anglo-Saxon = Germanic) and German are, this should be respected and declared. We in Germany do not consider Obama as an "African-American" (although this phrase worked well during the Presidential Campaign 2008), far from that, if at all, then he must be declared an African-Germanic-American. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.190.125.186 (talk) 02:07, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Ethnic group and Nationality Semantics are being ignored. Obama is not African American, but in fact Black American. (Elon Musk is African American) as being African and American has NOTHING to do with skin color. 2600:1700:D7F0:7B10:459A:71F1:EBF8:11D (talk) 19:38, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

Au contraire, African American by the definition used by many scholars, is not about mere ancestry in an African country but rather lack of specific ancestry due to the systematic treatment of black slaves in the USA. People who can trace their ancestry to a specific country, by this definition, aren't to refer to themselves as AA but rather as X-American, with X standing for the nationality of their ancestry. All African-Americans are thus black, but not all black people in the US nor all people in the US with African ancestry count. It is related but "not as political" as "American Descendants of Slavery" (and parallel to racial self-identification, as many black activists called themselves foremost "black" in reference to a shared struggle with black people across the globe or at least in the various territories in the American continent). Of course, most media does not align with academic definitions, but just providing commentary as to why, say, it is not considered halal to call Charlize Theron African-American.--2803:4600:1116:12E7:710D:6337:6B78:7798 (talk) 04:37, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia states that Obama's mother is of English, German, Irish, Dutch, Scottish and French heritage. To call him African American or German American excludes other factors in heritage. If his father was actually part Arab then our Predident wil have more hyphens in his name than letters. Our president is an American like all those before him. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nickaponzi (talk • contribs) 02:47, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Racism against Obama

I fully understand not wanting unnecessary POV pushing about US Presidents. But to me (and I say this as someone that has mixed feelings about the Obama Administration), the article feels incomplete without discussing the intense racial animosity he faced during his presidency. The words "racism" and "racist" don't show up in this article a single time, and while Trump is mentioned, his role in pushing conspiracy theories about Obama's citizenship is not, despite them being a very prominent talking point among right-wing pundits at the time. The word "birther" is mentioned a single time, and it's only in the reference list.

Racism against Obama is something that's already been a subject of academic study both during and after his presidency, not to mention the countless op-eds that have analyzed this phenomenon. I can understand this page just mentioning it for a few paragraphs and linking to articles that go into the topic into more detail, but not mentioning it at all just does not do this page justice. DJ (talk) 07:44, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

Interesting. The closest I found was Presidency_of_Barack_Obama#Racial_issues, Presidency_of_Barack_Obama#Approval_ratings_and_other_opinions and Barack Obama "Joker" poster (Barack the Barbarian looks fun). He is not mentioned in Race and ethnicity in the United States. Public image of Barack Obama touch on it a little.

If there are good sources, this can clearly be expanded on in more than one place. It may deserve a mention in this article too, not sure where though. I think you could make a "Barack Obama and Racism" article if you want, WP:GNG shouldn't be much of a problem. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:46, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

alright, just added some info about both general race relations + racism he faced personally, along with a lot of other stuff. Per my edit comment: “Moved sections about Venezuela, Hiroshima & Africa to Foreign policy of the Barack Obama administration, moved a lot of info about his awards to Public image of Barack Obama, and added some tentative sections about his handling of race relations, as well as racism that he faced himself (with appropriate citations and links to other pages that cover this in more detail)” DJ (talk) 00:11, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm not entirely happy with Barack_Obama#Racism_towards_Obama. I spot checked your current cites 465-467, and none of them mentions "racism", making this a bit of a WP:OR. Also, there has been a pretty solid consensus against including the "birther" topic in this article, and about half the section is about that. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:14, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

I’ll admit I was a bit sloppy implementing it here, as I basically copied info from pre-existing articles and put them here, which is why a lot of it is tentative for now. But I understand it could be better, the topic deserves its own article, and the main reason I even mentioned the birther stuff is because its one of the only topics related to Obama & racism that’s already extensively covered on Wikipedia. Still, i’ll try to do some cleanup here. DJ (talk) 20:35, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

I disagree that there was "intense racism", Barack Hussein Obama could not have been elected without the large number of white persons who voted for him, it is likely that more white persons voted for Obama than did black persons.  The intense controversy surrounding Obama's presidency was concerning his eligibility to be a President of the United States, and the authenticity of his Hawaiian birth certificate. BrainiacOne (talk) 18:33, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

It depends where one draws the line for "intense" racism/racial animosity. Is it here? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 19:45, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, I mean, the racism stuff against Obama, is certainly less poignant without considering the fact that it was basically educated, white liberals who elected him. https://www.theroot.com/obamas-white-liberal-problem-1790865963

While white liberals later on didn't support him as much, they overwhelmingly supported his first election bid. The energy among them was electric, so, while there was racial animosity, the issues with race became a lot less prevalent. Pbs123456789 (talk) 16:22, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Agree with the premise: racial animosity toward Obama deserves better coverage in this article. If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. That statement raised a firestorm which is mentioned in the Barack Obama#Racial issues section of this article. But racial animosity toward Obama isn't really described in that section, which is part of the domestic policy part of the article.

• A nice sociolinguistic treatment of some of the racist attitudes toward Obama is in the book Articulate While Black. The study includes the background of incidents such as Obama occasionally code-switching to African-American vernacular, or the fist-bump, and then the political blow-ups which followed each incident. The book's analyses go beyond political and cultural responses to Obama, using these incidents as illustrative examples of the interplay between language and race relations. But the incidents themselves are documented and analyzed and could be included in an encyclopedia article. The book was published in 2012, it covers only a couple of years.

Alim, H. Samy; Smitherman, Geneva (2012). Articulate While Black. ISBN 9780199812967.

• Simply google-searching racial animosity toward Obama finds a Washington Post article The racist backlash Obama has faced during his presidency. It is one article in a retrospective on the Obama years. This is a short very high-level overview, but by looking up some of the individual incidents or following up on the quotes from Jimmy Carter, it seems it could be a good jumping-off point to write a history of racial animosity toward the former president.

Samuel, Terence (April 22, 2016). "The racist backlash Obama has faced during his presidency". Washington Post. Retrieved 2022-10-02.

• Racial animosity toward Obama is background to how Obama and the Black community navigated the complex dynamics of race: the racism against Obama is the political matrix that Obama had to navigate. I think Michael Eric Dyson's book The Black Presidency (I haven't read this one) covers the topic. His essay Whose President Was He? presages that book.

Dyson, Michael Eric (2016). The Black Presidency. ISBN 9780544387669.

Dyson, Michael Eric (January 2016). "Whose President Was He?". POLITICO. Retrieved 2022-10-02.

• There is quite of academic material on this subject. Simple searching on google or google scholar gets a lot of hits.

I think ultimately the subject is far too large to cover very well in this article. There were a lot of individual incidents, many of which are likely covered in other articles. There are a goodly number of academic treatments of the phenomenon, the article shouldn't be a simple list of incidents. The structure of this Wikipedia page is: sections contain a summary or precis of a topic, with a link to a Wikipedia page for a more full treatment. I suggest that properly there should be a single Wikipedia article on the phenomenon of racial animosity toward Barack Obama, linked to from a summary here. Quite possibly there is such an article or section already, but I haven't found it. But in the spirit of Wikipedia as an organic collaborative encyclopedia, an approach might be to start that article with a section here, and then split it into its own article as it grows. -- M.boli (talk) 16:30, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

All these sources look very, very good - and I've already incorporated info from the Washington Post link in this page - but you are also right that this topic deserves WAY mores space, and it definitely deserves a fully developed article of it's own (which I haven't found yet, unfortunately). DJ (talk) 06:54, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

I don't think there is one. Such an article could possibly also mention the comments around how African American he is (not being a descendant of American slaves). Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:16, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

The current "Racism towards Obama" section looks good. I'm unsure it would meet the WP:GNG on its own; if you want to expand on it, Public image of Barack Obama would be the best place. DFlhb (talk) 23:07, 19 December 2022 (UTC)