This reminds me of Richard Pryor’s comments when he came back from his first trip to Africa.
He talked about an African saying to him: “You look kind of Italian.” Pryor was shocked, and after all the ‘Not one of us’ stuff he’d no doubt been subjected to in his native land, he said he realized just how American he was.

Also recalls of an American Indian friend’s somewhat sheepish comment once about Arican-Americans, with whom she felt a lot of political commonality, ‘Some American Indians refer to African-Americans as the ‘black white men.’ [Other 'other?']

American ‘mongrels’ (all of us in, Obama’s self-deprecating humor) have the richness of really complicated otherness.

Might not this be different if everyone, especially the media, always pointed out that he was white and not black? Most children that I know never saw a difference until their elders pointed it out to them.

Our racist society has not let Obama identify himself as white from the time he was in school in Hawaii. He also made the decision to marry into a black American family and go to a predominately black church. The title to this article is off base, since if he sees himself as black, then so will America regardless of their biases or lack thereof.
Also mixed races that don’t include black skinned groups (Africans, Melanesians, Aboriginals, etc.) are often seen as primarily white – especially the many among us who are part American Indian, and part Mediterranean, etc.

Further, many such as part Hawaiians may look white but will be quick to remind you they’re Hawaiian. And so it goes. A rather uninspired article here all in all.

It ‘s hard to disentangle what your race is biologically from what you identify yourself as. A friend who has a white grandmother, but all other grandparents are African American, identifies as black, but considers his children (with white mother) to be mixed race. His daughter could ‘pass’ as white and I’d guess his son could too – but if you were to see the son with his father, you’d see the ‘blackness’ more readily. Very interested to see how they end up defining themselves as they grow up. And how they view others identifying them…

I think, eventually, it’ll come down more to culture and how you were raised over what your genetics really are. The adopted Asian child brought up in a white Christian home, will likely identify with that culture over Asian culture, but may learn more/adopt traditions from Asian cultures if introduced as a child or when they grow up. But others will see this person and say, ‘Asian’…so interesting conundrum…

In this country, I would think that identifying Obama as black has more to do with hypodescent and the one-drop rule than just scientific categorization of how we identify otherness. We have a long legacy of not allowing folks with “minority” blood to align themselves with the “majority” (and by default garner more power). The article is interesting on a global level, but there has never been a time in the history of the US that someone with a black parent has been allowed to identify as white, unless they were passing. How else would we keep slavery intact? Fortunately this is slowly starting to change.

As a fellow mutt, I’d remind the author that the one drop rule never went anywhere. You don’t need to look for a scientific answer to a social question.

This reminds me of what the white parents of an adopted mixed-race child told me in the 1970s of their friends’ perceptions of their daughter’s race/ethnicity. The adoption agency said she was likely half African-American and half Hispanic. Their African-American friends insisted she didn’t look African-American and must be fully Hispanic. Their Hispanic friends said she didn’t look Hispanic and must be completely African-American. Everyone agreed she was adorable.