It’s funny how some white people have expressed to me that President Barack Obama isn’t black.
They have told me that he’s half white, which is true considering his deceased mother is Caucasian. A white co-worker even told me that he heard Obama is only an eighth black, which I explained is impossible with the president’s deceased father being a full-blooded, dark-skinned Kenyan from Africa.
Regardless, Obama is considered black by the one-drop standard of our country’s forefathers and the old Jim Crow laws that treated blacks like second-class citizens before the Civil Rights Act was passed in the 1960s.

Now many blacks, especially the elderly who suffered through the Jim Crow segregation, have more reason to celebrate President’s Day because Obama is the first official black president of the United States of America, a feat that many blacks thought they would never witness in their lifetimes. And it doesn’t make blacks racist for wanting to celebrate President Obama’s historical achievement.
Racism is treating another race as an inferior, and Obama has tried to take care of all races of Americans through a half dozen stimulus bills and efforts to pass health care reform to cover the estimated 50 million without insurance.

Any American can be proud to have the Harvard-educated Obama represent the U.S. View a photo tribute to President Obama’s critical first 100 days in the Oval Office.
President’s Day is celebrated on the third Monday of February to honor past presidents, especially George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who have birthdays in February.
And some historians have speculated that Lincoln, who passed the law that freed blacks from slavery, was a black man because of the one-drop of African blood rule and former presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge also have been accused of hiding their African heritage.

But regardless of whether the other presidents were black, Obama deserves the distinction of being the United States’ first black president because he is proud to be a black man and he is an attentive husband to his black wife and their adorable black daughters who they are raising to be proud of their African heritage.

By Teneshia LaFaye
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