Senator Barrack Obama is white

I have a friend named Farooq, I think he'd be pissed if I spelled it wrong. :-) I absolutely do acknowledge that there are white members in his lineage, as well as there are blacks. Because of this, if one ignores the black members in the family, than one can say that he is white with no quarrel. However, it is not the case that Obama has no black lineage, as such, he is both black and white in a sense. However, you are asserting that he is white, and treating this as the only race to which his history applies. If you were to assert that Obama has white lineage in his family and is therefore "part white", then there wouldn't be any real debate to your stated topic. Rather, it would be a debate on whether it is possible to label someone's race as "Mutt" over any particular race. Instead, you have chosen to argue that he is white, and at no point in time gave mention to the prospect of him being Black as well. Given that that is the case, you have set the standard that there can only be ONE race for a person. If Obama can only be one race, and it is my job to prove that this race is not white, I assert that he is Black. I can look at the picture of his mother all day, and it would not change the fact that he has a black lineage to which he identifies. Further, given that he fits the phenotype of a black man, has history for one, and is considered by the general consensus of society to be one, it is clear that Obama is a Black man, and NOT white. You mention that people, like yourself, who wish to identify Obama as white should have equal grounding with those who choose otherwise. But, race is primarily a social construct. There have been shown to be some scientific (or statistical) differences between the races, but in the big picture, race is determined and measured by society. As such, equal grounding to the plea of Obama being white merely means that you have a VOTE in choosing his race. Your vote, however, is overturned by society's conventional wisdom on race. Which leads to your argument on what is "Caucasian". Caucasian is, according to dictionary.com, "Of or being a human racial classification distinguished especially by very light to brown skin pigmentation and straight to wavy or curly hair, and including peoples indigenous to Europe, northern Africa, western Asia, and India." Notice that the FIRST thing that is mentioned is how a white person LOOKS, and then the question of origin is brought up. All of the other definitions of Caucasian either allude to looks or a certain place in the Caucasus mountains. This means that how an individual looks gives the first indicators of the race of the individual, and then a question of one's background is taken into account. In fairness, Race may be an arbitrary definition, but it just so happens that society, as a whole, determines what factors constitute each race. Redundant though it may be, THIS society has chosen to designate Barack Obama as a Black man. Coincidently, Barack Obama ALSO designates himself as a black man (let's count his vote twice, it is his body, after all). In the end, what it comes down to is society. If the typical standards do not precisely apply to each individual, and in Obama's case, they do not, than some measure of "voting" could be be necessary. Society DID Speak, and now we have a black man with some white lineage, rather than the other way around.