ABSTRACT
B arack Obama is the first multiracial president of the United States. Because he is multiracial, millions in the United States and around the world see in him someone who can unite people of diverse backgrounds. Yet, he is commonly referred to as the first Black or African
American president. However, Obama’s mother is European American, so why is he not referred to as White? Obama in his “More Perfect Union” speech on March 18, 2008, in Philadelphia observed that “At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either ‘too black’ or ‘not black enough.’” Similarly, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founder W. E. B. Dubois, poet Langston Hughes, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., all had mixed-race ancestry but were referred to as Black. Perhaps these monoracial categorizations are part of a tradition of multiracial persons being classified as members of monoracial minority groups. We will consider such issues of racial/ethnic identity of multiracial Americans in this chapter.
