African-American President?

[howeird]

I'm going to step right into a big pile of it here, but that's what journals are for sometimes. Barak Obama is not an African-American. Not the way "first African-American President" means to me. He is not descended from Africans who came to America more than 150 years ago. He was not raised by people who were. When I think of African-American in the political sense, I think of a person whose family can trace themselves back to the times of slavery. Maybe not as slaves - there were a lot of free people north of the Mason-Dixon line, many who fought in the American Revolution. And I include those people who are descended from those folks whose lineage also includes people of other races. Thomas Jefferson was responsible for some of those folks.

Obama, on the other hand, is the son of an African man - born and raised in Africa, who abandoned his son to return to Africa and his other wives and children. Obama's mother was a Caucasian from Kansas, a cousin of Dick Cheney, and Barak was mostly raised by her parents.

Yes, he must have suffered from some discrimination based on his appearance, but as the son of a white middle-class mother he did not share the rest of the culture.

I make no value judgment here, I am only commenting on perceptions.

Comments

[vasilatos]

My first husband was a brown-skinned second generation self-identified Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, which made him also "African American" but without the cultural slavery/American background, he didn't/doesn't really identify with his black brethren, except that he's *black*. It's confusing.