Introduction

Prior to that amazing day of January 20 2009, many African Americans talked about Senator Barack Obama as if he was not “black enough,” would not understand “the black experience,” and that most Americans—by the time they realized that he was not a “real black man”—they also believed that he would not be able to execute the office of President of the United States. This notion of what counts a “true blackness” is receiving much revitalized attention as a result of CNN's Solidad O’Brien's critical discussion series “Black in America”: “the black experience” may be much more varied than the notion suggests. This chapter engages in the taboo discussion of intraracial variation among people recognized in the United States as African American.

Using a person-centered ethnographic approach and drawing on the works of early African American anthropologists and psycho-cultural anthropological scholars of motivation, this chapter examines the lived realities behind the racial variation that exists among African Americans as described in ethnographic interviews and participant observation (Levy and Hollan, 1998; Crapanzano, 1977). The analysis presented here relates their racial variation to the animosity that many experience from other African Americans, the acceptance or rejection that results and the need for a renewed discussion of the variation of racial compositions that exist within those recognized as African American (Davis, 1999; Mintz and Price, 1976). Although American culture encourages us to think of African Americans as racially and culturally homogenous, the argument presented here asserts that African American people are racially and culturally varied and that an understanding of this diversity is imperative if Americans—especially African Americans—are to understand the heterogeneous nature of this population (Herskovits, 1928; Foster, 1935; Davis, 1999).

Intraracial variation among African Americans

The broader issue here is one that is perennial for American understandings of African Americans: can some African Americans be more than one race (Sampson and Milam, 1975; Smith and Moore, 2000)? This question is central because it lies at the intersections between the social construction of being African American or black in the United States to which some conform and the genealogical realties to which others belong.