Skin Color Can Be Misleading
Traveling around the world, we can find people of various shades of skin color who are part of the same family, children of the same father and mother. These family members will develop their own unique identity despite the shared bloodline. Depending on their particular complexions and the standards of their new milieus, they will be classified as whites, blacks or brown.
Although the genetic progress encourage the rejection of this arbitrary race classification today, it may take a long time before prejudices based on race are replaced by the acceptance of one universal humanity with multiple variations of tones and shapes. These considerations are particularly important in these United States, a the time when a large portion of this country's population is willing and ready to elect a citizen who happen to be a mulatto, the son of a black man and a white woman, who calls himself black.
In doing so Barack Obama conformed himself to the Virginia law of the colonial period that provided, "if any Negro ancestry is 'ascertainable' one is a Negro". He is indeed a citizen respectful of the law more so than some past presidents of the United States who escaped the Negro classification because those who were confronting them could not ascertain their Negro ancestry. DNA was not yet known.
This was supposedly the case for Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln whose complexions did not show the slightest degree of "Negro strain", but who were loudly proclaimed by white people as being of Negro ancestry. A 1860 cartoon that appeared in David Browder's "Ordeal of the Presidency" depicted Abraham Lincoln with wooly hair.
Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's Vice-President, was often attack from the floor of the Senate as a Negro when he was a U.S. Senator from Maine because of his dark skin. To one opponent, he replied, "I take my color from nature; you get yours from the brandy bottle. Which one is more honorable?" These unproven Negro insinuations are reported in J. A. Rogers's booklet entitled "The Five Negro Presidents U.S.A."
This author also explained that "before the Revolution, many of Negro ancestry had become so white that whites who have been kidnapped and sold as Negroes could not prove they were really white, the more so that some of them were darker than the bleached Negroes". A case in point at that time was that of Salome Mueller, a white German girl who was sold as a Negro slave and remained so until her birth certificate was dug up in Germany to prove her real "race." However, Salome who married a Negro believed herself to be a Negro.
Shortly before the 1920 election day, the Democratic papers claimed that Republican candidate Warren G. Harding "was a Negro". And, before that, millions of mimeographed broadsides were distributed saying that Harding's father was George Tyron Harding, obviously a mulatto, and his mother "Phobe Dickerson, a midwife" was supposedly white.
Today there is no doubt or uncertainty, Barack Obama call himself Black, although like Harding's father, he is a mulatto with brown skin, and no one dare question his presidential aspiration and character qualification because of the shade of his skin. The time may have come as it is reported that in 1963, Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General, and New York senator Jacob Javits said "there might be a Negro President in the next thirty or forty years". Perhaps the time has come.
Traveling around the world, we can find people of various shades of skin color who are part of the same family, children of the same father and mother. These family members will develop their own unique identity despite the shared bloodline. Depending on their particular complexions and the standards of their new milieus, they will be classified as whites, blacks or brown.
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In doing so Barack Obama conformed himself to the Virginia law of the colonial period that provided, "if any Negro ancestry is 'ascertainable' one is a Negro". He is indeed a citizen respectful of the law more so than some past presidents of the United States who escaped the Negro classification because those who were confronting them could not ascertain their Negro ancestry. DNA was not yet known.
This was supposedly the case for Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln whose complexions did not show the slightest degree of "Negro strain", but who were loudly proclaimed by white people as being of Negro ancestry. A 1860 cartoon that appeared in David Browder's "Ordeal of the Presidency" depicted Abraham Lincoln with wooly hair.
Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's Vice-President, was often attack from the floor of the Senate as a Negro when he was a U.S. Senator from Maine because of his dark skin. To one opponent, he replied, "I take my color from nature; you get yours from the brandy bottle. Which one is more honorable?" These unproven Negro insinuations are reported in J. A. Rogers's booklet entitled "The Five Negro Presidents U.S.A."
This author also explained that "before the Revolution, many of Negro ancestry had become so white that whites who have been kidnapped and sold as Negroes could not prove they were really white, the more so that some of them were darker than the bleached Negroes". A case in point at that time was that of Salome Mueller, a white German girl who was sold as a Negro slave and remained so until her birth certificate was dug up in Germany to prove her real "race." However, Salome who married a Negro believed herself to be a Negro.
Shortly before the 1920 election day, the Democratic papers claimed that Republican candidate Warren G. Harding "was a Negro". And, before that, millions of mimeographed broadsides were distributed saying that Harding's father was George Tyron Harding, obviously a mulatto, and his mother "Phobe Dickerson, a midwife" was supposedly white.
Today there is no doubt or uncertainty, Barack Obama call himself Black, although like Harding's father, he is a mulatto with brown skin, and no one dare question his presidential aspiration and character qualification because of the shade of his skin. The time may have come as it is reported that in 1963, Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General, and New York senator Jacob Javits said "there might be a Negro President in the next thirty or forty years". Perhaps the time has come.