Washington Post: Barack Obama Is Not Black
So, does that mean his election isn’t historic?
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.
Ok. I guess it’s still historic because Obama is non-white.
Frankly, Obama’s skin color never mattered at all to me. I was more concerned with the fact that he’s a liberal, and worse than that a pragmatic liberal willing to set aside ideology to obtain power for power’s sake.
That Obama is sort of a beige color really didn’t enter into my calculations.
