To the United States and for Americans, everything is a binary. If you're not male, you're female; if you're not a Democrat, you're a Republican; if you're not white, you're black. Anything that doesn't fit into the neat categories we create is of little value to us; just ask Ralph Nader.
This may seem like an oversimplification, but I really don't think so. In a series of events too long and complicated to explain here, I have chosen to pursue a degree in Multiethnic Studies here at AU - a minor the university offers, but a major I have to design. At its core, the major seeks to explore how diversity plays an ever-increasingly important and visible role in our lives. The more I study and the deeper I delve into how American identities form and the way we see ourselves and others, it becomes harder and harder to deny the persistence of our culture to want to categorize people and things as self or other.
In "Black Boy," author Richard Wright's autobiographical masterpiece, the author said "Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black ..." Though the book first appeared in 1945, this idea still rings alarmingly true.
One of the most shocking things for any red-white-and-blue-blooded student to learn when they begin to pursue any sort of ethnic study is that a racial binary does not exist in every country. In many places in the world, race means more than black and white. Consider, for instance, the fluidity Brazilian nationals have. The country's census provides five racial categories - the same number as our own census - but the way in which an individual can describe himself or herself is endless; in Brazil, race has little to do with ancestry.
In the United States, ethnicity and racial classification are deeply intertwined and are more or less impossible to unravel. The idea of self-identification - the ability to declare for yourself just which half of the binary you'd like to belong to, is a relatively new idea to Americans. Instead of "white" and "other" now, citizens must consider the choice of hyphenating American with whatever nationality they'd like: Irish-American, Polish-American, Asian-American, African-American.
What is most troubling about this, however, is the way in which we have allowed ourselves to conflate ethnicity with race - a problem we see most sharply in the label African-American. This is especially true in this year's presidential election. Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, more so than many people we choose to refer to as African-American, ethnically fits this classification. Obama had a father from Kenya and a mother whose ethnic identity is never discussed outside of the fact she is from Kansas, so the hyphenated identity thrust on him is shockingly accurate. Yet when you google "Barack Obama African-American," you will receive some confusing search results with titles like "Is he African-American?" and "Is Barack black enough?" Even more telling, googling "Barack Obama black" will bring up results like "Is Barack Obama black or biracial?" and "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?"
Nearly every search result tied to Obama's ethnic and racial identity is an open-ended question. Obama's identity troubles the racial binary in a way that few issues in recent memory have managed to come anywhere near. Some have found harsh labels as the answer to these questions. But perhaps the most promising search result is "What does Barack Obama's race have to do with anything?" That is probably the only rhetorical question this election season that actually doesn't need an answer.
Kristen Powell is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Managing Editor for The Scene. You can reach her at kpowell@theeagleonline.com.
