Question

Address the following topics/questions

How would you describe the race of U.S President Barack Obama?

How does the President describe his own race?

Describe your own racial identity.

Discuss your own ethnic identity.

Think carefully about the sociological categories of race and ethnicity. Discuss at least one way in which these socially constructed categories impact people in U.S. society. Include a discussion of social class in your response, for an intersectional analysis.

Answer 1

What Is Your Racial and Ethnic Identity

Multiracial and multiethnic — or “mixed race” — people are a rapidly growing demographic in the United States. And more and more people, especially young people, are embracing and expressing their multifaceted racial and ethnic backgrounds. How about you?

In the article “Black? White? Asian? More Young Americans Choose All of the Above,” Susan Saulny explores how many young people are celebrating their mixed-race identities:

The crop of students moving through college right now includes the largest group of mixed-race people ever to come of age in the United States, and they are only the vanguard: the country is in the midst of a demographic shift driven by immigration and intermarriage.

One in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities, according to data from 2008 and 2009 that was analyzed by the Pew Research Center. Multiracial and multiethnic Americans (usually grouped together as “mixed race”) are one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups. And experts expect the racial results of the 2010 census, which will start to be released next month, to show the trend continuing or accelerating.

Many young adults of mixed backgrounds are rejecting the color lines that have defined Americans for generations in favor of a much more fluid sense of identity. Ask Michelle López-Mullins, a 20-year-old junior and the president of the Multiracial and Biracial Student Association, how she marks her race on forms like the census, and she says, “It depends on the day, and it depends on the options.”

They are also using the strength in their growing numbers to affirm roots that were once portrayed as tragic or pitiable.

“I think it’s really important to acknowledge who you are and everything that makes you that,” said [Laura] Wood, the 19-year-old vice president of the group. “If someone tries to call me black I say, ‘yes — and white.’ People have the right not to acknowledge everything, but don’t do it because society tells you that you can’t.”

How does president describe his own race?

It is official: Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president.

A White House spokesman confirmed that Mr. Obama, the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, checked African-American on the 2010 census questionnaire.

The president, who was born in Hawaii and raised there and in Indonesia, had more than a dozen options in responding to Question 9, about race. He chose “Black, African Am., or Negro.” (The anachronistic “Negro” was retained on the 2010 form because the Census Bureau believes that some older blacks still refer to themselves that way.)

Mr. Obama could have checked white, checked both black and white, or checked the last category on the form, “some other race,” which he would then have been asked to identify in writing.

There is no category specifically for mixed race or biracial.

Instructions for the census’s American Community Survey, which poses the question in the same way as the 2010 form, say that “people may choose to provide two or more races either by marking two or more race response boxes, by providing multiple write-in responses, or by some combination of marking boxes and writing in responses.”

In the 2000 census, when Americans first were allowed to check more than one box for race, about 6.8 million people reported being of two or more races.

How would you describe the race of U.S President Barack Obama?

Barack Obama’s first major discourse on race, was prompted by controversy over inflammatory remarks by Obama’s African-American pastor in Chicago, the Rev Jeremiah Wright. It came at a moment when he was establishing a small lead over Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination, but when a misstep on so sensitive an issue might have doomed his chances.

On 18 March, 2008, in Philadelphia, Obama took sharp issue with Wright’s “incendiary” language, but explained it in the light of slavery and America’s anguished racial history.

He placed the problem in the context of his own background, son of a Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother. “I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me ... but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her on the street, and who ... has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”