Barack Obama is not black

[snopes]

Comment: Barack Hussein Obama is not half black. He is the first
Arab-American President, not the first black President. Barack Hussein
Obama is 50% Caucasian from his mother's side and 43.75% Arabic and 6.25%
African Negro from his father's side.

While Barack Hussein Obama's father was from Kenya , his father's family
was mainly Arabs.. Barack Hussein Obama's father was only 12.5% African
Negro and 87.5% Arab (his father's birth certificate even states he's
Arab, not African Negro).

[Chloe]

So if it's all about the percentages, he's actually white?

[Richard W]

What happened to the "one drop" rule? Or is Arabic "one drop" more powerful than Black African "one drop"?

[ToadMagnet]

Who cares, anyway? (In the non-wacko world, at least.) There's no requirement that a US president have a certain percentage of any hereditary blood (that made more sense in my head), so we could even have a *gasp* Mexican-American or Asian-American president!

[wanderwoman]

Where the heck do those percentages come from? And how do they know what was on Barack Obama Sr.'s birth certificate? On his son's, he is listed as "African".

[Lainie]

Do we even know if he had a birth certificate? Vital records documentation practices vary over time and location. ETA: Senior, that is.

[GenYus234]

12.5% would be 1/8, so I guess their "research" found that Obama's father had one great-grandparent who was Negro and the rest were "Arab" (by which I assume they mean Northern Africa and/or Semitic).

[Tarquin Farquart]

Pretty Arabic looking bunch...

[Winged Monkey]

Originally Posted by wanderwoman

Where the heck do those percentages come from? And how do they know what was on Barack Obama Sr.'s birth certificate? On his son's, he is listed as "African".

Moreover - how the heck do we objectively identify "black" "arab" etc. These races are somewhat artificial themselves as its not as if through-out history Africa had a unified and homogenous population, let alone the peoples of the middle-east! It seems to me that a key component of race in the US is self-identification and culture.

Does President Obama identify himself as "black" - I think the answer is mostly, though he seems to strongly identify with the idea that he is of mixed raced.

Was/is President Obama treated as a "black" American, does he have any cultural connection to "blackness"? Again I suppose it's yes and no. He had a pretty varied upbringing, but I'm sure he's been largely viewed as a black person throughout his life and while not raised in a traditional African American community/family (or traditional American community/family at all it seems) he seems to have adopted some elements African American culture as intrinsic to his sense of self.

I think that makes Obama black by any rational standard I can fathom. It also points out how bizarre/wrongheaded the concept of race is.

-Winged Monkey

[Swordmaster]

I would just like to interject for a moment to say that the woman hugging the man standing to the right of Obama has the prettiest smile I've ever seen.

She just looks so dang happy!

/hijack

[Embra]

Originally Posted by snopes

Comment: Barack Hussein Obama is not half black....

And you ain't half wrong.

[Lainie]

Originally Posted by Swordmaster

I would just like to interject for a moment to say that the woman hugging the man standing to the right of Obama has the prettiest smile I've ever seen.

She just looks so dang happy!

/hijack

I agree. They're a lovely couple.

[Dropbear]

I wonder what point of the OP is. Is it that black people shouldn't vote for him because he's not really black or that he is really Arab and therefore untrustworthy or what. it just makes these weird and irrational pronouncements about his race (as if that was a real thing in the first place) and then sort of goes Ta-dah! as if it proved something.

Stupid as it probably would be I'd prefer them to have made their point clearer.

Dropbear

[me, no really]

I assumed the idea was that if he is half Arab, then he is also half terrorist, because we all know those dammed Arabs are all terrorists

or something

[Richard W]

I think the point is that "black" is no longer bad enough, but "Arab" is. Therefore, since he's "black" but nobody is shocked by that any longer, he must be "Arab" as well. (Or instead). Because either way, he's obviously wrong. I mean, just look at him. Even in that picture of him with his father's relatives, he still doesn't look like the rest.

[mags]

With the amount they've tried to reinforce the lie that he's Muslim, and that, among people who think that is true and matters, Arab=Muslim=terrorist anyway, it would seem superfluous to point out the Arab thing to those people.

I think they must be trying to sell "he isn't even one of you!" to black voters. Because, you know, a rich white Mormon really is one of them, I guess.

[E. Q. Taft]

I do recall some people claiming that Obama's background separates him someone from most American blacks, in that he is descended from a native East African, rather than being descended from slaves who were primarily West African.

IIRC, Obama himself sort of shrugged this off and said something to the effect of how that didn't make it any easier for someone of his ancestry to flag down a taxi.

In my view, he's "black enough" in the sense that he is someone anti-black racists fear and despise. Culturally, his background is all over the map....but I consider that to be a good thing. Someone who has been part of a middle-class white family in Hawaii, a Javanese family in Indonesia, then gone on to graduate from Harvard Law. been a community organizer, and been a professional-class black professor raising his own family, is going to have a nice broad perspective that I think is part of why he isn't locked into one rigid ideological frame.

(Also, in the OP, doesn't the "50% Caucasian" assume his mother was 100% Caucasian? I thought she had some Native American blood, at least.)

[Xia]

I don't know how he identifies himself, but I always wondered why he was usually called "black" when he is really of mixed race. Maybe it's just easier to say, or they are going by outward appearance or perception?
Although I really don't care what his ancestry is as long as he does the job well enough.

[Lainie]

Most "black" people in North America are probably mixed race. Many of the white people, too. But if by "mixed" you mean bi-racial, I've personally known several people who had one black parent and one white parent, and they all identified as black.

[ganzfeld]

When I was in school we were told that about one-third of "black" people were of mixed race and about one-eighth of "white" people. I don't know if that's even close to the real numbers.