You said: “Negro and “colored” weren’t asked for.
Even Caucasion wasn’t used (lest it be mistaken for “colored”).”
1. I don’t know what the basis for your claims above are. Let me reiterate that I cannot PROVE Hawaii used this form in 1961, but there is no indication in any of the numerous vital statistics tabulations regarding Color that Hawaii’s form did not collect this information.
2. You can see a copy of the standard form in use in 1961 here: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsus_1961_1.pdf on pdf page 228. Note that:
• Item 8. requests “Color or Race” of Father.
• Item 10. requests Birthplace (State or foreign country) of Father
• Item 13 requests “Color or Race” of Mother
• Item 15 requests Birthplace (State or foreign country) of Mother
3. Note further that “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.” See pdf page 231 at same cdc.gov URL. Thus, whoever was coding Obama’s birth should have been following this classification scheme. So you are correct that in the published vital statistics tabulations, by state, Census only reports White vs. non-white, but that doesn’t mean states weren’t collecting data at a finer level of aggregation.
4. Needless to say, “African” is not a race OR a color. While there certainly are many Blacks in Africa, there also are Afrikaners who are white, not to mention Arabs, Indians and others who certainly would not designate themselves as Black. So putting “African” in the race field would not have made sense. Moreover, if someone accidently did this in field 8, they would likely quickly recognize their mistake when they got to field 10 and had to fill in the father’s birthplace.
5. While the original birth certificates are filled out by hand and signed by doctor, I assume these records long ago were computerized (which is why the system can generate COLB when needed), in which case “funny stuff” such as an inadvertently miscoded Race field likely would have been flagged and corrected a long time ago using automated logic checks to ensure data was entered accurately.
6. We’ve already established that COLBs are generated automatically by a computer, and on Hawaii’s form, the Certification of Live Birth, it clearly states Father’s Race—not Birthplace—so with a computer was generating the copy, there’s no way it would have “mistakenly” grabbed the Birthplace field if for some reason African had been manually entered there. Realistically, “African” wouldn’t be the correct way to fill in the Birthplace field either: it should either have been Kenya or the town where Obama’s father was born).
Thus, apart from all the other digital evidence that these are forged documents, this error created suspicion in my mind from the get-go.
Still, the only recommended categories for reporting race in 1961 that had any standing were "white" and "non white".
As far as "African" being a suitible answer for "race" it most certainly was suitible. The term was used for a couple of hundred years in legal documents called covenants on property deeds and titles. Usually there was a prohibition on selling your property to a "member of the African race".
It's dollars to doughnuts someone can come up with an Hawaiian territorian birthcertificate or two that has racial nomenclature that defies interpretation.
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 ~