Moving beyond race was a big promise of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, if you believe media blatherers who tend toward obvious storylines and glom happily on to such catchphrases as "post-racial."

One argument in this storyline is that he's biracial. But does biracial equal "post-racial?" It's not always that easy, say some biracial Triangle residents.

They have been watching media wrangle with the question of Obama's racial identity -- his father was a black Kenyan and his mother was a white woman from Kansas -- and they've recognized aspects of their personal struggles with self-definition. It's something that isn't talked about too often, and rarely on the national stage. In 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, 1.6 percent of the U.S. population and 1.1 percent of the state's population identified themselves as multiracial.

Once Obama declared his run for president and his mixed parentage became more widely known, it was treated as politically reassuring. Some pundits got misty over his heartwarming American story. Detractors said he was just an easy solution for white liberal guilt, and besides, he wasn't really black. Anchor Julie Banderas of Fox News and radio talker Rush Limbaugh both called him a "halfrican."

Then came video of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, and his statements about the evils of an oppressive, violent, white-run America. Commentators were outraged that Obama had sat and listened to this guy for 20 years.

"I was like, 'Now is he black enough for you?' " says Lisa Boxill Ruth of Cary. She laughs.

Ruth, 37, has a few things in common with the candidate she supports. Like him, she graduated from Harvard Law School. She has a white mother from the United States; her black father is from the island of St. Lucia. She attended school mostly among white kids in Florida; Obama played high school basketball on a mostly white team in Honolulu, where he lived during much of his youth.

Ruth's father, Bernard Boxill, is a professor in social and political philosophy and African-American philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill, and he's written extensively on the subject of race.

"I thought that got me off the hook from having to prove myself," she says. "I didn't have to go out and find ways to prove that I was black."

Still, finding a black identity nagged at her sometimes. Obama has said that he found various ways as a teenager and a young man to find meaning and pride as a black American -- through basketball, for example -- and that his membership in Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ was life-changing. Ruth found that search for a black identity more difficult. "I just didn't know where to start," she says.

Until very recently, she hadn't even heard the term "post-racial candidate," and she repeats it slowly, with an air of incredulity.

"That just shows how laughably ignorant people can be," she says. "It's just so clear that we're not past it -- so not past it. We're at a different point. We're at a much better point in the story than we were even 10 years ago, or the kinds of things that my father went through 40 years ago. It's a completely different world. But to say that we're past it, that race doesn't matter anymore ... it's a nice thought. But I don't think we're there yet."

Questions of identity

Joanna Hernandez, 22, is an N.C. Central University senior who grew up in Silver Spring, Md. She says she understands the difficult struggle with identity that Obama wrote about in his 1995 book "Dreams from My Father."

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