[exit82]

Look, me, my father in law, and Barack Obama are all “black”, and my father in law’s principal reason for disowning me is that I am a traitor to the black race/cause, etc. by not supporting him

You're in luck. Tell your PhD F-I-L to look up Obama's family tree.

Obama is 50% white, 42% Arab and 8% black.

So, how are you a traitor to a man who is not black? Obama is a minority of a minority.

And tell him also, that it is racist to vote for something based solely on the color of his skin. You know, like George Wallace and the Southern white Democrats used to do.

And it certainly is not in keeping with Martin Luther King Jr.'s comment on the content of character being the criteria to judge upon.

Your F-I-L is seriously racist--another reason he should not be around to pollute your kids.

[Behind the Blue Wall]

You know I tried to follow up on that theory of him being Arab once, and I wasn’t really able to find a good reason to think that his Kenyan family was Arab. Arabs in East Africa have Arabic last names, and Obama is an African name.

Technically, I do think that there are substantial salient differences between Africans and black Americans, so in that sense I sort of agree with you that he’s not really black. But that argument would fall on deaf ears with my father in law because he clearly believes that Obama is black.

I do agree with you absolutely that a person should be judged based on their actions not on their skin color, and I said as much in my email.