What a responsibility, to have the future of post-racial America on one’s shoulders, depending on how quickly their
population grows. Schoeller Martin’s photographs attempt to demonstrate the growing numbers of multiracial citizens in the United States, and how varied a mixed race individual can look. This variation and racial ambiguity, as well as their growing population, are the main arguments posing mixed race individuals as indicators of a post-racial society. In reality, the experiences of multiracial individuals often gives prominence to race -- their racial ambiguity often confuses people and leads to the question: “What are you?”

Such is the case with late President Barack Obama. Although deemed the first black President of the United States due to the one drop rule, Obama is in fact of mixed race. His identity is not advertised often, only in joking asides such as likening himself to what kind of dog him and Michelle Obama would be getting their daughters: a “mutt like me.” A lacking acknowledgement of his heritage is produced by the confusion that his racial ambiguity spurs:

“Some people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13 when I began to suspect that by doing so I was integrating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am.”

This is typically the reality of mixed race individuals exposing their identity -- a strange confusion of the beholder in which they do not know how to classify and therefore treat this multiracial person. Instead of race becoming obsolete, it becomes more prominent as the onlooker struggles to distinguish where exactly this mixed race person’s loyalties lie. In Honolulu, a mural named “Hapa” that is slang for a person of mixed racial heritage was made by Kamea Hadar to demonstrate how proud Hawaii is of our first mixed race President. The shading in the mural demonstrates the darker and lighter shades of skin Obama is composed of.

The unification of multiple identities contained in the individual’s parents that make up multiracial individual produces a person with the responsibility of “middle ground.” A person of mixed race contains a multitude of identities that are often expected to allow said person to be a representative of all of the cultures and groups that are apart of their heritage. In the process, mixed race individuals are expected to serve as the happy medium between their multiple cultures, as well as a sign of progress towards the ideal post-racial society.

In reality, this conglomeration of identity often leads to, as Cherrie Moraga words it, “a foot in both doors,” but wanting to “refuse the split.” Moraga, a white-passing Chicana writer, acknowledges in her essay La Guera that although she knows the joys of her Chicana heritage such as her family, the lightness of her skin often lead to a disparity between her and her family. She did not experience the discrimination her mother and the rest of her family (excluding her white father) did for being darker skinned. Moraga does to a certain extent serve as a middle ground between her Chicana culture and her white-passing looks, but it was only after  she acknowledged “the fact that much of what I value about being Chicana, about my family, has been subverted by anglo culture and my cooperation with it.” She found herself choosing one door without realizing it; the door that lead her to higher opportunities of education, which was the door holding anglo culture.

During Obama’s presidency, he faced similar issues of being caught with “a foot in both doors.” He often had to appeal to the white Democrats and the Independents that voted for him by trying to embody the idea of being post-racial or race-neutral. However, as Anna Everett references in her essay “Have We Become Postracial Yet?” Race and Media Technologies in the Age of President Obama, when issues involving that inevitably came into play, Obama was often attacked as “favoring his race,” in reference to his father’s heritage as an African American man. For instance, when Obama “inserted himself” in a race matter concerning the arrest of black Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates and white Cambridge Police Sergeant Joseph Crowley, seeing an overreaction in the Harvard Professor’s arrest, people attacked Obama. They accused him of “siding with the black guy without hearing the fact first.” (Poster by rancher61, July 28 2009 via Everett) Obama was often unable to comment on racial matters for fear of the volatile white reaction that could follow that accuses him of favoring his black heritage.