Why is Barack Obama Black?

The race card has now been played in the Presidential race. Geraldine Ferraro has resigned from the Clinton campaign amid a firestorm resulting from some off-handed comments she made regarding the race of Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.

The pictures you see are of a recent photo of Senator Obama in the top left corner, an old picture of his mother, Ann, to the right, and an old picture of his father, Barack Obama, Sr. And as you can plainly see, his father is mostly black and his mother is mostly white, in today's terms. So, what does that make the Senator?

In anthropological terms there are three races, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid, or a mix thereof. Senator Obama is then a mixed race person.

The Senator's father was a Kenyan educated in the U.S. His parent's divorced when he was two years old. His absentee father returned to Kenya to work in the government there. Here are some quotes from the Senator about his absentee father:


"All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own," the brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader -- my father had been all those things."

But, as an adult, he learned there was a darker side to his Harvard-educated father.

"A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!"

Barack Obama Sr. was born in Kenya in 1936. He met Obama's mother while both were college students in Hawaii. But the marriage broke up when the senior Obama went to study at Harvard.

"He and my mother divorced when I was only two years old, and for most of my life I knew him only through the letters he sent and the stories my mother and grandparents told."

The senior Obama was also essentially a polygamist.

The way Obama describes it in his book, his father had two children by a woman in Kenya before meeting Obama's mother in Hawaii. Then, when the junior Obama's parents' marriage dissolved around 1963, the senior Obama returned to Kenya with another woman he met in the United States and had two children by her. But that didn't stop him from resuming his relationship with his first wife.

I certainly understand a young Barack wanting to discover his roots. But upon discovering those roots and seeing that he was chasing a ghost, it would seem that he would tend to distance himself from that.


So why is Barack black when he is as much white as he is black?