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."

Still, for some young biracial people like her who came up during the hip-hop era, identity seems more like a personal issue than a social one -- even though the latter still exists in a big way.

Hernandez says that in her old neighborhood, "it was majority Spanish, Asian and black."

She attended racially diverse schools and recalls that other kids didn't give her a hard time about her father being Costa Rican and her mother being African-American. But with her long, soft, curly hair and caramel skin, she found the most acceptance among Hispanic friends.

Later on, as a young woman, she began to think of herself more as "black," one of the reasons she decided to attend NCCU, where she is arts and entertainment editor at The Campus Echo newspaper.

"The [historically black college] thing was kind of an added bonus," she says. "I really wanted to connect and meet people, and be surrounded by people that were like me, and be taught by people that looked like me."

For a young woman with two black half-brothers from a black father, the search for identity continues to be complicated and ever-changing.

"Lately, I've been kind of wanting to embrace the Costa Rican side of myself more," she says.

She thinks Obama's lighter skin tone makes it "easier" for him as a black candidate.

"If he were dark-skinned, if he were Don Cheadle or something, I think it would be different," she says. "I feel like people have that complex -- dark skin, light skin."

Change over time

The perception of what is dark skin versus what is light skin varies, of course, from person to person. Geremy Gills of Raleigh, who is black, says that when he first saw Obama delivering his famous 2004 Democratic Convention speech, he had no idea the senator was biracial.

"I thought he was just 100 percent black," Gills says.

He figures that his nearly 2-year-old son Cameron, whose mother is white, will be perceived as black by society, because of his dark skin color. Should Obama win the election and be re-elected, he would be the only president a 10-year-old Cameron would know.

"I'm hoping that maybe it'll shine a light in his head," Gills says: " 'Wow, this guy could run for president. He's basically the same as I am. I could do the same thing.' "

Many polls give Obama a double-digit lead in North Carolina over Democratic rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton going into next Tuesday's primary. Professor Boxill says that old-time Southern Dixiecrat hatred of "race-mixing" seems very distant.

"It's just incredible how things have changed," he says. "There is progress. Not that everything is perfect. But compared to what it was 50 years ago, the very idea that people can witness race mixing and not get all angry about it is fantastic."

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