May I add something to this? And this is not a knock against you, don-o, but sometimes what frosts me is when people call smart blacks, or any people, for that matter, "articulate". To me, this is just codespeak for "we're surprised that a black man can speak so well".
Why be surprised? Why shouldn't one speak well, regardless of the color of his/her skin? Again, I'm not trying to start something, but I do notice that phrase used, particularly with black folk (such as are TBM, and Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Clarence Thomas, and many other black conservatives).
Anyway, didn't mean to hijack the thread, hope I didn't, apologies if I did. I just think that the sooner we celebrate knowledge, education and achievement, without having to attach the color labels to it, or the "first black this, that, or other" (witness this past Super Bowl), the sooner we get rid of the history of dividing by race. (And by extension, the death of the Democrat Party as we know it)