[jamese777]

“Kenya is next to Somalia, so there are lots of Arabs there, just as we have lots of Mexicans.”

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Indigenous Somalis are not Arabs, they’re of the Somali ethnic groups. An Arab is someone whose native language is Arabic. The ethnic Luo of Kenya (Obama’s father’s ethnic group) don’t speak Arabic and ethnic Somalis don’t speak Arabic either. The Somali Language is Cushitic/Afro-Asiatic and the Luo of Kenya speak Luo languages that are Nilo-Saharan in origin not Arabic.
As long as Kenya remains in Africa, Obama is rightly entitled to call himself an African-American on his father’s side and a Kansas-American on his mother’s side!

[expatpat]

You guys are getting pedantic on me; Sudan is next to Somalia. I don't care what he wants to call himself. There are also a lot of Guatemalans here in the US, and Italians, for that matter.

[Fred Nerks]

http://www.popline.org/docs/1680/300506.html

“Abstract:

The Afro-Arab community living along the coastal belt of Kenya and Tanganyika contains persons claiming Arab nationality by either patrilineal or matrilineal descent in whom the biological Arab strain may vary between individuals born to pure Arab parents speaking Arabic and those in whom the Arab strain is unobservable and who speak Swahili. It is not accepted that the term Swahili covers the social interrelationships between these variations. The Swahili-speaking Afro-Arabs can be adequately described as Swahili but they nevertheless wish to be regarded as Arabs by outsiders and to speak as much Arabic as they can learn...”