Obama’s Answer to Matt Barnes’ Race Question Is a Reminder That Blackness Isn’t a Monolith
When Barack Obama sat down with former NBA player Matt Barnes, a biracial American with Black and Italian heritage, their conversation turned to questions of identity. In a June interview, Barnes asked Obama whether there was a moment when he realized that, no matter how proud he was of being biracial, the world would always see him as a Black man.
It was the kind of question that could have led to a painful reflection on race in America. But Obama, who we can always count on to tell a good story and has recently revealed a more candid side, explained how his upbringing gave him a broader perspective on identity.
Obama spent much of his childhood in Honolulu, Hawaii, as the son of a white anthropologist from Kansas and a Kenyan economist. He remembered that there were few Black people on the island, but diversity was everywhere. “Everybody’s mixed up,” he said, referencing the mix of Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, and white people.
In Hawaii, being different was the norm. Obama explained that there wasn’t the same pressure to choose one racial identity over another, unlike what he might have experienced in a city like Chicago. “You didn’t have to deal with that,” he reflected.
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Although his father wasn’t present during his childhood, Obama credited his mother for always speaking highly of him.
“She always praised my dad even though he wasn’t around,” he shared, noting how she spoke of his father’s brilliance. His grandparents also gave him positive images of his dad, so he wasn’t absorbing negative ideas about his identity.
Still, as Obama succinctly put it, “You show up, somebody looks at you … and you Black.”
The real challenge came when he moved to the mainland. There, Obama said he had to learn to become comfortable in his own skin without “trying too hard” to fit into someone else’s idea of what it meant to be Black. He knew his experiences were different from those raised “in the streets,” and that became central to his identity.
“Part of the thing I figured out around 19, 20 was there’s no one way you gotta be; there’s no one way to be Black,” he reflected.
Obama recalled going through a rebellious phase, including getting high and teasing a college friend who acted like Carlton Banks before the character on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air ever came to be. A friend from East St. Louis called him out, challenging Obama to remember his own identity and background. Obama called it a “good correction” that reminded him that Black identity isn’t something that fits neatly into a single box.
