早在美国大选之前，我就写过一篇“凭什么说奥巴马是黑人”的文章。美国《华盛顿邮报》11月30日发表署名Marie Arana的文章，题目是He's Not Black（英文原文附后），摘要如下。

　　他也是半个白人。

　　我们称我们的当选总统是黑人———他称自己是黑人———因为我们使用的是过时的语言和逻辑。经历了300多年的苦难历史后，我们仍死守陈旧的种族主义法则：只要有黑人血统就是黑人。50%等于100%。不存在半黑半白的人。

　　这就是我在选举次日的反应，我看到本报头版印着：“奥巴马创造历史：美国决定性地选出首位黑人总统。”

　　一家接一家的媒体用差不多同样的词汇重复着这句话。感觉就好像我们一脚跨入未来，一脚仍陷在南北战争前的南方。

　　词汇的发展跟不上进步的步伐。

　　鉴于多种族混血人口越来越多，在我看来，贝拉克奥巴马不是我们首位黑人总统。他是我们首位跨种族、跨文化的总统。他不仅仅代表着非洲裔美国人的成就。他是种族之间的桥梁；他是宽容的生动象征；他是一个标志，标志着严格的种族划分必须废止。

　奥巴马登上总统宝座不仅仅是黑人的胜利。世界已经变得过于融合、过于互相依存，以至于人们无法忽视这个新出现的现实：同银行、地球资源和人类疾病一样，种族关系也构成了一张错综复杂的全球网络。

　　作为西班牙裔美国人，我的血统几乎囊括了所有种族。在美国，拉美血统的人总是难以确定种族。上世纪60年代末，《民权法案》迫使美国人开始思考种族问题。在此之前，我们填人口普查表时总是填白人一栏。1970年后，表格上有了西班牙裔一栏，我们就选这栏。但从2000年开始，公民可以在种族类别中选择多个选项，于是我们中的许多人把所有选项都选上了：土著居民、白人、亚裔、非洲裔。

　　种族通婚代表着美国以盎格鲁血统为基础的美国种族体系的惨败。我们为何不承认这是革命浪潮？我们为何不能找到词汇来形容它？我们为何要继续使用陈旧的词汇，把一名黑白混血儿称为黑人？

　　就连奥巴马本人似乎也使用这种命名方式。他在回忆录《我父亲的梦想中》写道：“在美国，我一直试图把自己看作一名黑人。然而，除了我的外表之外，我身边似乎没人知道黑人究竟意味着什么。”

　　北美一直不情愿承认种族融合的事实。在纳粹德国和种族隔离时期的南非盛行的反种族通婚法律在美国的许多州一直使用到1967年，直到“洛文诉弗吉尼亚州案”废除了这些法律。这些法律的目的，尽管没有明说但不可否认，就是为了保持种族的“纯洁性”，确保白人至高无上的地位。对白人而言，与黑人、亚洲人或印第安人生儿育女不仅是令人讨厌的，而且是要受到惩罚的。然而，跨文化的种族融合一直在无声无息地进行着。

　　在过去半个世纪，美国“少数族裔”人口激增必然导致越来越多的种族融合不可避免地发生，而且还在不断增长。

　　证据无处不在。如果不在我们身边，就在我们的文体圈中，诸如泰格伍兹、哈莉贝里、本金斯利、关南施、玛丽亚凯丽。然而，我们仍坚持用一个简化了的名称来称呼这些混血儿：贝里是黑人。金斯利是白人。关南施是黄种人。就连他们本人也用他们皮肤外表的颜色称呼自己。语言尚且如此，叫我们如何能够称自己生活在一个后种族主义社会？

　　我不禁想起社会学家特洛伊迪斯特和生物伦理学家皮拉尔奥索里奥说过的一句话：所谓肤色，很少是皮肤外表的颜色。有的人看上去是白人，而其血统大部分来自非洲祖先。有的人看上去是黑人，而其血统大部分来自欧洲祖先。

　　当选总统皮肤颜色说明不了多少问题。皮肤颜色是一个不可靠的标志，一个欺骗性的包装形式。我们现在难道不应该停止使用这种纵容种族划分的标签吗？我们的语言现在难道不应该有所改变吗？

He's Not Black
By Marie Arana
Sunday, November 30, 2008; B01
He is also half white.
Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.
We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.
That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President."
The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.
To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.
Of course there is much to celebrate in seeing Obama's victory as a victory for African Americans. The long, arduous battles that were fought and won in the name of civil rights redeemed our Constitution and brought a new sense of possibility to all minorities in this country. We Hispanic Americans, very likely the most mixed-race people in the world, credit our gains to the great African American pioneers of yesterday: Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr.
But Obama's ascent to the presidency is more than a triumph for blacks. It is the signal of a broad change with broad ramifications. The world has become too fused, too interdependent to ignore this emerging reality: Just as banks, earthly resources and human disease form an intricate global web, so do racial ties. No one appreciates this more, perhaps, than the American Hispanic.
Our multiracial identity was brought home to me a few months ago when I got my results from a DNA ancestry lab. I thought I was a simple hemispheric split -- half South American, half North. But as it turns out, I am a descendant of all the world's major races: Indo-European, black African, East Asian, Native American. The news came as something of a surprise. But it shouldn't have.
Mutts are seldom divisible by two.
Like Obama, I am the child of a white Kansan mother and a foreign father who, like Obama's, came to Cambridge, Mass., as a graduate student. My parents met during World War II, fell in love and married. Then they moved back to my father's country, Peru, where I was born.
I always knew I was biracial -- part indigenous American, part white. My mother's ancestry was easy to trace and largely Anglo-American. But on my Peruvian side, I suspected from old family albums that some forebears might actually have been African or Asian: A great-great aunt had distinctly Negroid features. Another looked markedly Chinese. Of course, no one acknowledged it. It wasn't until the DNA test percentages were before me that I had a clear and overwhelming sense of my own history. I wasn't the product of only one bicultural marriage. My ancestral past was a tangle of races. When I sent back for an analysis of the Indo-European quotient, I was told that my "white side" came from the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. There had to have been hundreds of intercultural marriages in my bloodline. I am just about everything a human can be.
Still, the same can be said for many Hispanic Americans. Perhaps because we've been in this hemisphere two centuries longer than our northern brethren, we've had more time to mix it up. We are the product of el gran mestizaje, a wholesale cross-pollination that has been blending brown, white, black and yellow for 500 years -- since Columbus set foot in the New World.
The Spanish and Portuguese actually encouraged interracial marriage. It wasn't that they were any more enlightened than Northern Europeans, it was that their history of exploration, colonization and exploitation had been carried out by men -- soldiers and sailors -- who were left to find local brides and settle the wilds of America. The Catholic Church, eager to multiply its ranks and expand its influence, was prepared to bless any union between two of its faithful, regardless of race. So over the years, the indigenous people of Latin America were handily converted, mixed marriages propagated abundantly, a new fusion of races was born and the Church prospered.
At first, those unions were largely between the native population and Iberians -- El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, for instance, the great 16th-century chronicler of the Spanish Conquista, was the son of a Spanish captain and an Andean princess. Later, the Atlantic slave trade sparked widespread mixing among blacks, whites and Indians -- particularly in Venezuela and Brazil. And then, in the late 19th century, a fourth ethnic group was imported to the continent in the form of Chinese coolies who came to work the guano islands and sugar fields. They, too, intermarried.
Latinos in the United States have always been difficult to fix racially. Before the late 1960s, when civil rights forced Americans to think about race, we routinely identified ourselves as white on census forms. After 1970, when a Hispanic box was offered, we checked it, although we knew that the concept of Hispanic as a single race was patently silly. But since 2000, when it became possible for a citizen to register in more than one racial category, many of us began checking them all: indigenous, white, Asian, African. It would be false to do otherwise. "Todo plátano tiene su manchita negra," as we say. Every banana has its little bit of black.
With so much history in our veins, Hispanics tend to think differently about race. The Latino population of this country continues to be, as the New America Foundation's Gregory Rodriguez puts it, a vanguard of interracial mixing.
"By creating a racial climate in which intermarriage is more acceptable," Rodriguez writes in his new book, "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds," Latins are "breaking down the barriers that have traditionally served to separate whites and nonwhites in the United States." Mexican Americans, he claims, "are forcing the United States to reinterpret the concept of the melting pot . . . [to] blur the lines between 'us' and 'them.' Just as the emergence of the mestizos undermined the Spanish racial system in colonial Mexico, Mexican Americans, who have always confounded the Anglo-American racial system, will ultimately destroy it, too."
In other words, intermarriage -- the kind Hispanics have known for half a millennium, the kind from which Barack Obama was born, the kind that is becoming more visible in every urban neighborhood in America -- represents a body blow to American racism. Why don't we recognize this as the revolutionary wave that it is? Why can't we find words to describe it? Why do we continue to resort to the tired paradigm that calls a biracial man black?
Even Obama himself seems to have bought into the nomenclature. In his memoir "Dreams from My Father," he writes, "I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant." You can almost feel the youth struggling with his identity, reaching for the right words to describe it and finally accepting the label that others impose.
It doesn't have to be that way. As the great American poet Langston Hughes once wrote, "I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word 'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. . . . I am brown."
Hughes was right. North America has been slow to acknowledge its racial mixing. Anti-miscegenation laws, which were prevalent in Germany under the Nazis and in South Africa during apartheid, were still the rule in a number of states here until 1967, a mere generation ago, when the case of Loving v. Virginia finally struck them down. The goal of those laws, unspoken but undeniable, was to maintain racial "purity," ensure white supremacy. It was not only undesirable, it was punishable for a white to procreate with a black. Or an Asian. Or an Indian. And yet a quiet cross-cultural mixing continued all the while. Even under Thomas Jefferson's own roof.
The explosion of "minorities" in the United States in the past half-century has guaranteed that ever more interracial mingling is inevitable. According to the 2000 Census, there were 1.5 million Hispanic-white marriages in the United States, half a million Asian-white marriages, and more than a quarter-million black-white marriages. The reality is probably closer to double or triple that number. And growing.
The evidence is everywhere. If not in our neighborhoods, in our culture. We see it in Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Ben Kingsley, Nancy Kwan, Ne-Yo, Mariah Carey. Yet we insist on calling these hybrids by a reductive name: Berry is black. Kingsley is white. Kwan is yellow. Even they label themselves by the apparent color of their skin. With language like that, how can we claim to live in a post-racial society?
A few years ago, after I gave a talk about biculturalism at a Pittsburgh college, a student approached me and said, "I understand everything you say. I too am a child of two cultures. My mother is German, my father African American. I was born in Germany, speak German and call myself a German-American. But look at me. What would you say I am?" She was referring to her skin, which was light black; her hair, lush and curly; and her eyes, a shining onyx. "I am fifty percent German. But no one who sees me believes it."
Few who see Barack Obama, it seems, understand that he's 50 percent white Kansan. Even fewer understand what it means to be second-generation Kenyan. It reminds me of something sociologist Troy Duster and bioethicist Pilar Ossorio once observed: Skin color is seldom what it seems. People who look white can have a significant majority of African ancestors. People who look black can have a majority of ancestors who are European.
In other words, the color of a president-elect's skin doesn't tell you much. It's an unreliable marker, a deceptive form of packaging. Isn't it time we stopped using labels that validate the separation of races? Isn't it time for the language to move on?
aranam@washpost.com
Marie Arana, the editor of Book World, is the author of "American Chica," a memoir, and the novel "Cellophane." Her second novel, "Lima Nights," will be published in January.