Like President Obama, I Learned The Value Of Diversity From My Interracial Family

"For me... writing was the way I sorted through a lot of crosscurrents in my life ‒ race, class, family. And I genuinely believe that it was part of the way in which I was able to integrate all these pieces into something relatively whole." ‒ President Barack Obama


With only a couple days left in President Barack Obama's administration, I ‒ like the rest of the country ‒ am looking back on his legacy. There will be countless Obama retrospectives published this week, and this is an especially reflective time for those of us who are African American.

If you're looking for an in-depth, objective analysis of Obama's policies and the effect they had on America and Black America, in particular, this isn't it. This is an intentionally personal reflection on Obama's presidency. 

It certainly has been a major step in the right direction for Americans to have seen a competent black man and his intact, functional family in the White House for the better part of the past decade. I love the fact that black children ‒ especially my nieces, nephews and cousins ‒ will grow up taking for granted that an African American can hold the highest office in the land. It's important for people of all races to see ourselves reflected in our leaders.

One significant way that I see myself reflected in Obama is that, like me, he grew up in an interracial family. Unlike Obama, both my parents are black. And while I'm not biracial like the nation's 44th president, I do have three white stepparents and four biracial younger siblings. 

Obama pondered how his mixed-race heritage led to his ability to relate to voters from different walks of life ‒ and they to him ‒ in Ta-Nehisi Coates' excellent piece in The Atlantic, "My President Was Black." In a series of interviews, Coates elicited some very candid responses from the soon-to-be-former president.

Coates makes the following astute observation about Obama, with regard to race relations:

Obama's early positive interactions with his white family members gave him a fundamentally different outlook toward the wider world than most blacks of the 1960s had. Obama told me he rarely had "the working assumption of discrimination, the working assumption that white people would not treat me right or give me an opportunity or judge me [other than] on the basis of merit."

He continued, "The kind of working assumption" that white people would discriminate against him or treat him poorly "is less embedded in my psyche than it is, say, with Michelle."

I can relate to Obama's words ‒ and maybe it's because, like him, I was raised in an environment where diversity was the norm. I grew up in the 1970s and '80s in Columbus, Ohio, with a white stepfather and two white stepmothers. 

The Buckeye State's capital city may not be one of those "coastal elite bubbles" we've heard so much about since the presidential election last fall ‒ in fact, it's smack-dab in the heart of fly-over territory. My hometown is in the center of a swing state that turned "red" and went for Trump. But the east side neighborhood where I grew up was integrated and afforded me the luxury of ignorance. I was blissfully unaware that my blended family was in any way "abnormal." 

I was one of only a few black students at my Catholic grade school. I then transferred to the majority-black public high school a few blocks from my house. In the late '90s, I graduated with honors with an English degree from The Ohio State University, which has a very diverse, international student body and is like a mini-United Nations.

As an adult, I've made my career as a journalist and have worked in both predominantly black and predominantly white organizations.

I've felt comfortable in each of these environments. Like Obama, when I encounter people who are different from me, the "working assumption of discrimination" isn't automatically embedded in my psyche. 

Is this because of my "positive interactions with [my] white family members," as Coates observed of Obama? Is it because, like Obama's white grandparents, my white step-grandparents treated me well during childhood visits to their farm in rural, lily-white Mt. Gilead, Ohio? Mt. Gilead is a place where you would have seen a sea of "Make America Great Again" yard signs had you driven through there leading up to the election.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not espousing the "Diff'rent Strokes" approach to diversity ‒ the notion that black children raised in white environments learn to assimilate and, therefore, tend to be more successful in life. This isn't necessarily the case.

Overall, I had positive experiences with my white family members and classmates growing up. But I've read many accounts of African Americans and other people of color who were adopted into white families and/or went to mostly white schools who were bullied and discriminated against or, at the very least, felt isolated and marginalized, that they never truly fit in.

Just this past Martin Luther King Day, NPR's "Fresh Air" featured an insightful interview with acclaimed African-American journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in which she discussed the nation's historical reluctance to desegregate schools, her painstaking decision to continue to send her daughter to a segregated school in New York City, and her own painful experience of attending a nearly all-white school in Iowa growing up. Hannah-Jones expounds on the issue in her article in The New York Times Magazine.

I'm certainly not naive enough to believe that we live in a colorblind meritocracy. Rather than this simplistic world view, I take a more nuanced philosophy from Obama. The example he set is that when people of any race have positive experiences with diversity early on, it can give them the tools to navigate a world in which there are many people who don't look, act or think like you. 

(Chris Bournea is the co-author, with Raymond Lambert, of the book "All Jokes Aside: Standup Comedy is a Phunny Business." Bournea is also the writer and director of the soon-to-be-released documentary "Lady Wrestler: The Amazing, Untold Story of African-American Women in the Ring.")