The Presidential Politics of Race

More and more multiracial people are identifying themselves as such. Not our president.

Obama has a black father and a white mother. What does that make him? Black, of course.

In indentifying himself as "black" instead of multiracial, which would have been more accurate...

"Obama made the politically correct choice," San Francisco State University political scientist Robert C. Smith told me last week. "If he had come to Chicago calling himself multiracial, he would have had no political career. And I think if he called himself multiracial now, black people would see it as a betrayal."

For all the post-racial symbolism millions of Americans have projected onto the president, his political choices are at odds with emerging demographic trends. America will just have to find its way into the new multiracial era without him.

Hey, not talking so much about race isn't the worse thing this president has done.