DEPARTMENT OF SILLY TALK

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PAUL FARHI WASHINGTON POST - Is Fred Armisen, who is not African
American, "black enough" to embody Obama on "Saturday Night Live"?
Debate over that question has been pinging around the Internet since
Armisen, a veteran cast member, donned darker makeup to portray the
Democratic candidate for the first time Saturday. Armisen played Obama
opposite Amy Poehler's Hillary Clinton in a sketch satirizing the
supposedly cushy treatment his candidacy has received from the media.

"SNL" impresario Lorne Michaels said yesterday by phone that he thought
the sketch played so well that the show intends to air another
Obama/Clinton debate spoof tomorrow night, with Armisen and Poehler
reprising their characters. . .

Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune put the question bluntly: "Call me
crazy, but shouldn't 'Saturday Night Live's' fictional Sen. Barack Obama
be played by an African-American?" Ryan went on to conclude: "I find
'SNL's' choice inexplicable. Obama's candidacy gives us solid proof of
the progress that African-Americans have made in this country. I guess
'SNL' still has further to go on that front.". . .

NY TIMES, 2004 - Mr. Obama, 42, was not raised by black parents. His
mother, who is white and from Kansas, split with his father, a Kenyan
economist, when he was just a toddler. His father returned to Africa -
and visited his son just once, when Barack was 10.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama's mother and her parents raised him, mainly in
Hawaii. He did not grow up in a black world and his family had no
particular connection to the black experience in America. . .

Mr. Obama seems to have realized early on that his situation would
present him with some odd and complicated choices. In his memoir,
"Dreams From My Father," he writes that he did not talk much about his
mother's whiteness because he feared that "by doing so I was
ingratiating myself to whites" - a shrewd assessment of white people for
a 12-year-old, and an even shrewder assessment of himself.

He would, therefore, go in the world as black because he thought it was
the right thing to do, and because - it's clear from his book - he loved
and missed and was mad at his father. . .

CHICAGO TRIBUNE - Obama was born in Hawaii. His mother was an
18-year-old white college student, whose parents had moved to Hawaii
from Kansas. His father, Barack Hussein Obama, was an African, a native
of Kenya employed as a low-level clerk who wrote letters to 30 colleges
in the United States asking for a scholarship before getting an offer
from the University of Hawaii. Obama already had a wife and family in
Kenya when he married Obama's mother, Stanley Ann. When he left
Honolulu, Stanley Ann and their two-year-old son did not go with him
because he could not afford it on the scholarship Harvard offered. Obama
saw his father again only once - when he was 10 and his father came to
visit.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-0703270151mar27,0,5157609.story


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/28/AR2008022803988_pf.html


SAM SMITH, GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL REPAIR MANUAL - What are considered
genetic characteristics are often the result of cultural habit and
environmental adaptation. As far back as 1785, a German philosopher
noted that "complexions run into each other." Julian Huxley suggested in
1941 that "it would be highly desirable if we could banish the
question-begging term 'race' from all discussions of human affairs and
substitute the noncommittal phrase 'ethnic group.' That would be a first
step toward rational consideration of the problem at hand."
Anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1942 called race our "most dangerous
myth."

Yet in our conversations and arguments, in our media, and even in our
laws, the illusion of race is given great credibility. As a result, that
which is transmitted culturally is considered genetically fixed, that
which is an environmental adaptation is regarded as innate and that
which is fluid is declared immutable.

Many still hang on to a notion similar to that of Carolus Linnaeus, who
declared in 1758 that there were four races: white, red, dark and black.
Others make up their own races, applying the term to religions (Jewish),
language groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish). Modern science has
little impact on our views.
Our concept of race comes largely from religion, literature, politics,
and the oral tradition. It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the
ages. It reeks of territoriality, of jingoism, of subjugation, and of
the abuse of power.

DNA research has revealed just how great is our misconception of race.
In The History and Geography of Human Genes, Luca Cavalli-Sforza of
Stanford and his colleagues describe how many of the variations between
humans are really adaptations to different environmental conditions
(such as the relative density of sweat glands or lean bodies to
dissipate heat and fat ones to retain it). But that's not the sort of
thing you can easily build a system of apartheid around.

As Thomas S. Martin has written:

"The widest genetic divergence in human groups separates the Africans
from the Australian aborigines, though ironically these two 'races' have
the same skin color. . . There is no clearly distinguishable 'white
race.' What Cavalli-Sforza calls the Caucasoids are a hybrid, about
two-thirds Mongoloid and one-third African. Finns and Hungarians are
slightly more Mongoloid, while Italians and Spaniards are more African,
but the deviation is vanishingly slight."

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