As Michael Jackson said, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white

Okay, so here’s a very simple question: Why does everyone refer to President Obama as America’s first black president? Do they think he’s black? I can understand why they call him African American because he most assuredly is, his mother was American and his father was African. That’s incontrovertible. But black?

His father was a black man but his mother was a white woman – by that measure if you’re going to call him a black man by virtue of having a black father, you could just as easily call him a white man because his mother was white.

So if we’re looking to take away positives and counter attempts by those who seek to sow division by insinuating Obama’s heritage is somehow less worthy than say Ronald Reagan’s or George W Bush’s or Richard Nixon’s (all very white Republican gentlemen), we could say that what may well make Barack great is not that he’s a black president, but that he’s a black and white president. And the very first one at that.