Turns Out That Obama Is NOT The First Black President Of The US

That's because Obama is not black:

He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President."

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

...To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president.

Of course, calling Obama black was not a question of racism--it was a question of politics. There is a better draw in running as America's first black president. Calling for the election of the first biracial president of the US? Ummmm, not so much.

There was an awful lot of packaging that went into selling Barack Obama.
And it's going to take a long time to remove all the wrapping before we know just what's inside.

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