Tyche Hendricks, San Francisco Chronicle
- On blogs and around kitchen tables across the country, mixed-race Americans are celebrating the fact that, for the first time, a biracial person, Barack Obama, will be a major party’s nominee for president of the United States.
Obama identifies as African American, and much has been made of the historic nature of his candidacy, which could make him the country’s first black president. But he also frequently evokes his mixed heritage: his white mother from Kansas and his black father from Kenya. His presence on the national political stage is being embraced by multiracial Americans as an opportunity to focus attention on the growing population of multiracial people and deepen the debate about racial identity.
“There’s a huge level of excitement,” said Jilchristina Vest, co-director of iPride, a Berkeley nonprofit that runs a summer camp for multiracial kids and trains teachers on honoring ethnic diversity. “He really represents the multiplicity of mixed Americans.”
