As you have probably have been hearing all over the news Barack Obama is now the United States first African American President. While it is great that this has happened their are things about Obama that make this accomplishment not as great as it seems. The first is that he is only half black, he also half white. So if he is the first black president he also the forty-forth white president. That means the chain of white presidents has not been broken but it is damaged. One has to wonder if he was fully black would he still have been elected, just like it must be considered if Hilary Clinton would have made it so far in the primaries if she was not married to a former president.
Another race issue for Obama is that his father was an immigrant from Kenya meaning that unlike the large majority of African Americans he has no slave ancestors. Part of the reason that the idea of a black president is looked at so fondly is that a group of people once seen as nothing more than property has one of their kinfolk rise to the highest office in the land. Instead we get a gene line that never had to go through many of the harsh things that have happened to blacks in America.
Obama should not be ashamed of the fact that he only half black or does not have slave lineage but people should stop acting like those facts are not there. Many people like myself believed that it was not a question of if but when their would be black president. While we most of us imagined it would be a fully black person with slave ancestors, Obama's winning is a monumental achievement that proves that people of any ethnicity can become president too.
