You said: “whether or not folks from India who lived in Africa would call themselves “black” is not an issue ~ the Brits called them “black” and the South African Nationalist government called them “black””
“Only white Americans make a big deal about distinguishing the various types of non-whites from each other. Hawaii was not, in 1961, run by white Americans from the 48 ~”
Well, apparently, things have changed, memories are flawed, or perhaps you’re just wrong:
“But I checked with the vital statistics registrar in Hawaii and the “African” nomenclature is incorrect. In 1961 it would have been “black” or even, “negro”.
http://www.macsmind.com/wordpress/2008/06/12/koss-obama-birth-certificate-fake/
Also, in the source I provided earlier: “Births in the United States in 1961 are classified for vital statistics into white, Negro, American Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Aleut, Eskimo, Hawaiian and Part-Hawaiian (combined), and “other nonwhite.”” http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsus_1961_1.pdf pdf p. 229
Now look at the further instructions it provides regarding how things should be coded:
The category “white” includes, in addition to persons
reported as “white,” those reported as Mexican or Puerto
Rican. With one exception, a reported mixture of Negro with
any other race is included in the Negro group; other mixed
parentage is classified according to the race of the nonwhite parent and mixtures of nonwhite races to the race of the father. The exception refers to a mixture of Hawaiian and any other race, which is classified as Part-Hawaiian.”
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsus_1961_1.pdf pdf p. 231
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but that sure sounds like Hawaiians didn’t particularly care to get mixed up with any other race!
Indeed, look at Table 2-4. Live Births by Specified Race and Sex: United States and Each State on pdf p. 49 of http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsus_1961_1.pdf. It lists 230 Negro births in Hawaii! Moreover, look at footnotes 3 and 4, which provide a breakdown of the Other Races category: for males: ‘Includes 2,498 births to Hawaiian and Part-Hawaiian (In addition, there were 336 births to Hawaiians and Part-Hawaiians residing in other States.);’ for females: ‘Includes 2,424 births to Hawaiian and Part-Hawaiian (In addition, there were 336 births to Hawaiians and Part-Hawaiian residing in other States.)’”
It would appear the vital statistics folks in Hawaii were substantially more fastidious about tracking Color categories than one might infer from your post.
I think you misunderestimate the value that people who work in this field attach to accurate data:
“The principal value of vital statistics data is obtained
through the presentation of such data in the form of rates,
which are computed by relating the vital events of a class
to the population of a similarly defined class. Vital statistics and population statistics must, therefore, be classified according to similarly defined systems and tabulated in comparable groups.” pdf p. 228
Indeed, there’s a whole rulebook to help keep them in bounds!
“The complete rules followed in the classification of geographic and personal items for births are set forth in the unpublished instruction manual “Coding and Punching Geographic and Personal Particulars for Births Occurring in 1961.” pdf p. 228
So you’re right that it’s not an issue of whether Indians would call themselves Black: it’s what CENSUS would have called them. It’s not my claim that bureaucrats are perfect and always follow the rules. I’m just saying that “the system” is unlikely to have allowed an error such as “African” either to be entered initially or to persist once the records were automated. Thus, if this is genuinely on Barack Obama’s birth record, it would be an anomaly: it’s certainly POSSIBLE, but not PROBABLE.
I believe this is why the poster who contacted the Hawaiian registrar got the answer above: it’s not that the registrar was trying to recall what the rules were nearly 50 years ago: only that the individual was sufficiently experienced with the rules and appropriate ways of categorizing Color or Race that it would be obvious on its face that African would not have been an acceptable response since a PLACE/COUNTRY cannot ever be accurately used to denote a RACE.
Might be quite intriguing.
The records nurse might well have not been in any position to do the sort of filtering later analysts (Census, HHS, etc.) might do when presented with such materials, so she just wrote down what the correspondents said.
That material would then be reflected in a current document drawing down on the original source materials.
Maybe the babydaddy was present. Maybe he was there and said he was "African" - he might even have been a follower of Ghana's first President, Kwame Nakruma, and he was insistent that Africa (subsaharan BTW) needed to be organized as a United States of Africa for the benefit of the African race.
Yup, I've read all ol'Kwame's stuff and recall a fair amount of it. He was quite popular in the early '60s among African intellectuals ~ all 10 of them ~ (and I knew 4 of 'em - Good lord were those folks in trouble).
I doubt any records nurse would get away with arguing with the elder Barack Obama.
I think it's interesting that modern technology is giving us access to exactly what people said "way back when" before there were any federal impositions on the parlance of ordinary people about what "race" might mean.
BTW, in UK "race" means "ethnicity", and among dog breeders "race" means "descent" ~ not that any of that is relevant, but Hawaii was a UK property before it belonged to the USA.