why does obama get labelled as 'black'?

[Geronimo]

Because he's black

He's definitely not white

 

[Deleted User 11453]

Read an interesting article the other day that in places like New York which have such a melting pot culture and have done for some time, attempts to define race by the census parameters are becoming pointless. Ask the kids what race they are and they don't say they're Black or Hispanic or whatever, they say they're half Cuban and half Dominican, or part Jamaican part Panamanian etc. it won't be too many generations before racial / ethnic labels will be meaningless in some places.

And then there's Idaho.

What's happened in Idaho?

Edit:

The United States Census Bureau estimates that the population of Idaho was 1,612,136 on July 1, 2013, a 2.8% increase since 2010.[1]

At the 2010 Census,

• 89.1% of the population was White American
• 0.6% Black or African American
• 1.4% American Indian and Alaska Native
• 1.2% Asian American
• 0.1% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander
• 2.5% of two or more races.

11.2% of Idaho's population was of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin (they may be of any race).[33] As of 2011, 27.2% of Idaho's children under the age of one belonged to racial or ethnic minority groups, meaning that they had at least one parent who was not non-Hispanic white.[34]

 

[mackem in milan]

To answer this question seriously, the racial history of the united states is such that anyone who could visually be identified as having any African ancestry was labeled as "black" and discriminated against accordingly. When there were laws on the books permitting black people to be legally discriminated against (within Obama's lifetime, although just barely, and the most vicious ones had already been struck down), the typical legal definition was that if you had one-eighth or more African ancestry, you were legally "black," or as they usually called it "Negro" or "colored." So many people who to modern eyes are obviously of mixed ancestry - and often of mostly white ancestry - were labeled as and considered themselves black. It's a relatively new phenomenon in American culture for someone to be identified as mixed race. Before that, if you looked even part black, you got called black and therefore treated like shit. There's a long and sad history of degradation and discrimination behind all this, but one obvious and easily noticed corollary of this is that many Americans who self-identify as black (as Obama does) are even lighter in skin tone than he is.

Yeah, I was going to say the one drop rule but then I thought when the primary campaign for 2008 started he was sometimes referred to as mixed-race or biracial in the media, there's a BBC article here where they call him mixed-race and they wouldn't now.

 

[greedminds]

Aye! just like Bob Marley, he inherited his music from his Mams side and his dancing from his Dads side, thank God it wasn't the other way round.

 

[roker beach]

Obama sees himself as black, just as Bob Marley did and most people of mixed race do. It is presumably a combination of how people view themselves and how they are viewed by others.

 

[chriswallace85]

Because he "couldn't be Bruce Springsteen" I think is what he said.