News-Record.com

With all due respect to T.L. Cassell (letter, Nov. 24), while he is correct that President-elect Obama is biracial, as we define the term these days, he is wrong when he asserts that Obama is not an African American. Although his mother was, as pointed out, a Caucasian woman originally from Kansas, his father was a foreign student from Kenya, which is a country in Africa. Thus, if the truth be known, he is more truly an African American than most of those in this country designated with that term.

Considering that the ancestors of most African Americans lived in the United States for at least a couple of generations, there isn’t very much about them that is African except the origin of some distant ancestors. And if the truth be known, most of them are multi-racial, as we define the term, as there is practically no one in that ethnic group who doesn’t have some admixture of Caucasian, Native American or some other ethnic group. However, let’s keep in mind that there is only one human race with a lot of ethnicities.

Philip van Lidth de Jeude
Carrboro