I knew the piece would raise hackles. It did mine. But it was worth reading nonetheless, in my view. One reader sums up the views of many of you:
Sailer is culturally illiterate. Obama didn’t create the one drop rule that pervades American society, he just lives under it. He points to Tiger Woods as an alternative to Obama without
mentioning that Woods is the exception, not the rule. His mother’s ethnic identity as an Asian undoubtedly informed his decision to dub himself Cablinasian (a distinction fraught with its own psychodramas–why Caucasian first?). As a product of a black/Asian family, his family history plays outside of the white-black narrative that pervades our national history and led to the persistence of the tragic mulatto in 19th century American fiction.
More relevant figures that Sailer might have mentioned if he were intellectually honest are Halle Berry and Mariah Carey. Like Obama, they were the products of divorced black fathers and white mothers raised mostly by their white families. Despite their being more fair-skinned than Obama and thus more likely to "pass," they have both been widely recognized as black, especially as they have gotten older (see: Berry’s Oscar triumph or Carey’s R&B/hip-hop heavy comeback).
This is not the story of a part-white man abandoning his family. It’s the story of a part-black boy, becoming a man, and realizing that his mother’s race didn’t matter much in the eyes of strangers. An article this ignorant of America’s racial history could only be pubished in Pat Buchanan’s magazine.
Another adds:
Sailer may have read Obama’s book looking for a slant. I have to assume you haven’t if you think his reading is any way correct. Barack speaks often in his book of the love and support of his maternal grandparents. He spent most of his teenage years with them. When he discusses his late teenage and adults years and coming to grips with black identity, it’s hard for me to see that as ‘rejecting’ his white grandparents or white identity. I’m just an ordinary white guy, and the first few years out of my parents’ home and on my own were also a time for soul-searching and finding my own identity. I didn’t reject my parents as much as forge my own place in the world, and neither did Barack.
I haven’t read the book, but plan to. You can get it here and make your own mind up.
The Dish 