Maybe they really meant “African,” since Obama Sr. was an African.
Negro was the name used by African-Americans before they were called African-Americans.
So an African who was not African-American might have been called an African, not a Negro.
See?
Again, it’s the Albright problem, which is also the liberal/PC problem. Race-designations used to be very easy: Caucasion, Negroid, Mongoloid. Hawaii, and perhaps the rest of the PC USA, got just about everything wrong. Only two of the race-designations offered were anywhere near the mark: “white,” and “negro/negroid” (although the natural sequitur would have been “black”). The rest (Chinese, American Indian, etc.) are not RACES; they’re nationalities or ethnicities.