Calling Barack Obama The First Black President May Be Racist

By Kleinheider Posted on November 30, 2008 at 9:18 pm

Marie Arana explains:

It’s as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.

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Tags: Barack Obama, biracial, black, multiculturalism