Biracial identity was a hot topic well before Barack Obama, born of a black father and white mother, became President. But now the questions surrounding it have become even more salient. What is biraciality? Is it biologically definable? Can people choose which race to be, or are racial categories forced on them by society? Are biracial individuals pushing our notions of race to the breaking point? Is the world moving toward an era in which the only race is the human race, or will racial categories stick with us forever?
To begin, John and Ken consider whether race is a "biological reality". Biologically, are people of different races are so similar that interesting distinctions cannot be drawn between them? And if that's the case, is there no such thing as race? Race certainly has biological pretensions---so if the notion of race is biologically empty, it would seem that we got something from nothing.
Without a biological foundation, is social practice enough to ground the notion of race? Is claiming that someone is black (or white, or both) is a statement about his cultural heritage rather than his genes? In this sense, being black might be more akin to identifying (or being identified) as American than to being a mammal. Culturally, Obama is more white than black---but then why is it socially unacceptable for him to identify as white? And is it "appalling" (as one caller says) that Obama consistently self-identifies as black, rather than biracial?
Michele Elam, professor of English at Stanford and director of the university's Program in African and African American Studies, highlights that racial categorization is associated with both negative and positive things---for example, on the one hand, facilitating harmful discrimination, while on the other fostering healthy and tight-knit communities. In the rest of the show, she touches on whether race is an intrinsic or relational property of persons, whether racial categories are always based on physical appearance, and whether we should even want to arrive at a postracial age.
The show ends with a postracial haiku from a caller:
No more need to bend.
We're all part of the twenty-
first century's blend.
- Roving Philosophical Report(寻找7:05):朱莉·纳波林采访了约翰的孙女阿尼萨，她认为自己是爱尔兰人和非裔美国人混血。她不经常见到她的非裔美国家庭成员，但当她见到时，她感觉自己像个局外人。然而，她也不太适应她的白人家庭!当她和他们在一起时，没有人(甚至包括她自己)意识到她有一半的白人血统。事实上，只有当她和黑人在一起时，她的白人特征才会显现出来。可以理解的是，这个种族之间的间隙是一个孤独的地方。这就是阿尼萨考虑上霍华德大学的原因。她听说，尽管霍华德一直以来都是黑人，但在这个地方，混血儿们可以在一个支持性的环境中发现自己的身份。而这正是阿尼莎想要的!
- 60-Second Philosopher(寻求到49:20):伊恩·肖尔斯调查了“悲剧的黑白混血儿”的刻板角色，一个混血儿(通常是女性)试图伪装成白人，往往造成悲剧后果。Ian traces a lineage of such characters from the 1933 novelImitation of Life, in which a poor white widow hires a black nanny with a light-skinned daughter, through subsequent films inspired by the novel, paying special attention to the issue of racial stereotypes in the film industry.
