The Mental “Mulattoness” of President Obama

Being mulatto in the Dominican Republic, where 80 percent of the population is classified as such, does not bear the same social marking as it does in Haiti or the United States. In the 48 square miles that encompasses us, minority groups don’t form ghettos; we all mix together naturally in a way that makes us unique.

Not even the Brazilian racial blend, which includes mestizos, zambos, mulattos, whites and blacks, has allowed a uniform socio-economic mixture like the one delineated by Columbus, Lemba, and Enriquillo in the Dominican Republic to create the Creole that invented the merengue, which represents them five hundred years later. The War of Haitian Independence was both social and racial, and created stark divisions between whites, blacks, and Affranchis. Today, there is no intermingling amongst these groups; each dug its own trench, creating a segregated society and a fragmented country characterized by distinct structures of thought.

In the U.S., Lincoln did not erase the differences when he emancipated blacks in the South. Martin Luther King knew this and Jesse Jackson does as well, and two nations converged into one great nation with a predominance of whites and the segregation of blacks. Two worlds shaped the culture and subculture that molded different attitudes and discourses. Therefore, black religious leaders and civil rights activists were never, even remotely, able to approach the White House.

Obama, the first non-white president of the U.S., won command of the nation by being mulatto and engaging in a way of thinking removed from racial extremes. His rhetoric was forged in the home of white grandparents and by the black seal that guided his daily steps. His mixed roots inspired the discourse that united the two nations living within one great nation. So to say that Obama is black, which effectively obscures his white lineage that helped carry him to the presidency, is a thoughtless act that denies the importance of what lies in his “mulattoness.”