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Why Is Barak Obama Considered African American?

Okay, let's dispense with the obvious. His skin is light brown. He calls himself African American. His father was "black." All these things are clear. Straightforward. Undeniable.

Also undeniable is the fact that his mother was white. He was raised by her and her parents . . . which put him, for a good portion of his developing years, in a white-dominated household. Let's not talk about the visible for a second, but just the literal. He could just as easily be a white man if one bases that determination on background and heritage.

Even this, however, isn't the full story. He was only 2 when his parents divorced. This took the "black man" influence out of his life. Just plain removed it. He has stated that early knowledge of his father was limited to family stories and photographs. His predominant father figure was his stepfather, an Indonesian man with whom he grew up. He had a half-sister from this union. This all makes him, literally, half-black and half-white, with an Indonesian father figure, a half-white and half-Indonesian sister, raised in, alternately, an Indonesian and a Hawaiian environmentwhere he was born and, after return from Jakarta, attended school from 5th to 12th grades.

So I repeat my title question: Why is Barak Obama considered African American? Lest anyone say I'm ignoring the truth, the reality of a life that must've been hard . . . living a childhood and adolescence with a physical appearance far different than that of his family members-that could certainly have been an issue for a maturing young man, but he himself was quoted as saying, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk barely registered in my mind." This from the man himself seems to indicate that his differences weren't all that different to him, and that his life was, well, his life. Period.

And before anyone tell me my question is racist, that I don't understand the black experience . . . to that I would respond, indeed, I really don't. I can't. But my question is not racist. It's an attempt to understand why the "One Drop" rule still literally rules. Why someone who is part black becomes all black, and seems to lose all sense of Caucasian heritage when the world gets hold of him or her. And why someone who may be part black but doesn't look it cannot publicly claim that heritage because, to the world at large, looks are everything. If you can't look the look, you

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