Originally Posted by percy

I wonder what we would call him if we as the human race were not given the gift of eyesight.

Maybe we would have more labels to pin on people. Maybe less.

Originally Posted by Randle2I

I find the race debate in our country to be rather pathetic in all honesty. Black people want to bring it up more often than not while white people want to ignore it all together. While I realize those aren't true for all whites & all blacks it is true for far to many of them. People are afraid of each other, they're afraid of people that don't look like them, and that covers gender, race, political standings, religion, and every other divisive thing out there. If men weren't afraid of women there wouldn't be so many threads asking how do I gain more confidence & approach this girl I like. If anti-abortionist weren't afraid of pro-choice then clinics wouldn't be burned down & death threats wouldn't be sent out. If people weren't afraid of gays then slurs and slanders wouldn't be thrown out like cheap towels as often as they are.

The fact is Obama acts & looks like a lot of black people out there. He just doesn't act like the ones we see on TV, on shows like Cops, or the ones we see at 11:30 at night lounging by the local liquor store, or the ones we notice in movie theaters acting rude, childish and as if something is owed to them. Noticing that he's black neither reduces nor elevates him to anything except in the minds of those that are afraid of him. It also isn't a great disservice to our nations politics to take note that he's black. He has the potential to become the first (half) black president of the United States, I think that's pretty major.

The fact that many black people themselves disagree on how they should be addressed should be more of an issue, IMO, than whether Obama is considered black or not. That's a whole nother ballpark though.

Originally Posted by dc_dux

Here is an interesting fact:

From the post Civil War era until the year 2000, the US government did not recognize "mixed race". The 2000 census was the first time that a person could check that designation and list the races in the space provided.

Prior to 2000, "mixed race" was not an option on the Census form. If one checked "other" and filled in "black-white"...that person was counted as black....if filled in "white-black"...that person was counted as white.