Just to reiterate, the poster saying it was ‘US law’ to define one’s membership in a ‘minority group’ as 1/8 ancestry was making it up, or as another poster noted referencing obsolete laws in some states defining who as a ‘negro’. There is no law defining minority group membership for the purpose of modern day race preferences, or identity politics. It’s just whatever the person feels, or is willing to say they feel, with some limit as to what will ‘sell’ with the target audience in case it’s a private preference or the world of politics (eg. the NAACP lady who had no apparent recent African heritage but considered herself African American, that didn’t fly with enough people to sustain once it was known, but there’s no clear illegality in making such a claim even for personal benefit).
So there’s a logical problem with the current system also, which is becoming a greater source of opposition to such policies in an age of higher immigration (should current day African immigrants who come to the US voluntarily benefit from policies to redress historical prejudice against the descendants of those brought here against their will?, should white South African immigrants benefit too?) and higher rates of intermarriage. And especially as the idea of ‘race’ preference has been extended to more ambiguous groups like Hispanics.
When I said “the 1/8 law”, I meant the law as it was in Florida and a few other states a century ago, not any purported current law (which I am not at all surprised to learn does not exist).
You know, there is actually a wiki page on his family. There are self-declared Arabs in Kenya - a whopping 40,000 or so, mostly on the coast around Mombasa in particular. Obama’s family appears to overwhelmingly from the far west, where the Luo ( a few million of them ) mostly live. That he may have some Arabic ancestry wouldn’t be surprising or shocking. But I am suspicious about whether your genealogy actually reflects reality.
At any rate the difference between “Arab” and “black” in Africa doesn’t really follow American assumptions about race and aren’t particularly intuitive in an American context. You can self-consciously be an Arab in a place like Sudan, even a racist one who denigrates what they consider “blacks” and still have skin color that is considerably darker than President Obama’s.
Obama is black because Americans define blackness by skin color and he lives in the USA. My mixed race nieces and nephews are black despite their white father, because they have mocha skin. Obama’s actual ancestry as such is therefore functionally irrelevant as far as how he is treated by the society he lives in.
Medieval England did have slaves though. As an institution it declined after the Norman conquest - but still as of the Domesday Book in 1086, ~10% of the population were slaves.
Well I’m convinced. I thought the source would be some crackpot site. But the “Central Florida Community Impact Alliance” seems legit. They got their information from the well respected site arcadeathome.com. Yeah, that’s a gaming site. But gaming sites are my go-to source for Presidential genealogy research.
I read somewhere that the word “slave” came from the fact that so many of medieval Europe’s slaves came from the Slavic region.
If you think about it, culturally Obama is about as far from African-American as he could get, considering his skin colour. His African father left before he was born, he had minimal contact with him, he was raised by a white mother and grandmother in the most culturally diverse place in the USA, 2500 miles from the nearest “black ghetto”. (With a brief interlude in Indonesia). I’m guessing he didn’t encounter much of the deeper social problems African-Americans face, or their culture, until he went to college. Then he got an elite education at Harvard, which put him in a different milieu than the vast majority of Americans, black or white.
yet despite being cosmopolitan, with an experience of the wider world and an education that displayed his brilliance, and a career that was even more outstanding - he still got a loads of virtual manure dumped on him simply because of his skin colour.
(IMHO the person with the most amazing story to tell would be Michelle’s mother - growing up in an era where open discrimination and “Whites Only” signs were the norm, to living in the White House. That has to be an incredible transition… Raising your children well can be rewarding.)
As for “Obama was Arab?” WTF??? In terms of ethnicity, seriously? Google his picture. If he’s Arab, then so is all of Africa. I’ve been to the Middle East, I’ve seen darker-skinned Arabs. they don’t look like that. That area of Africa is Muslim typically, the ones that didn’t convert when the Europeans took over; Barak but as mentioned above, plenty of Muslims are NOT ethnic Arabs.
Barack: A Hebrew name ברק from the Tanakh (Old Testament) meaning ‘lightning’. Not Arabic.
Hussein: One vernacular spelling for the Arabic name الحُسَين al-Ḥusayn. Which means ‘the little handsome one’. The original person by that name, Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, was the little brother of al-Ḥasan ‘the handsome one’, so in effect they called him ‘Little Ḥasan’, using the Arabic diminutive form. When our president was born in 1961 the name Hussein had not gotten bad press the way it did when Saddam ruined it in the 1990s. At Obama’s birth the name Hussein was associated with the then-young and dashing, aviating King of Jordan. He got plenty of good press. His reign tried to implement moderation and he was a good friend to the British. His conquered great-grandfather, his assassinated grandfather, and his deposed father never achieved stability in Jordan, but Hussein made it a model of stability in the Arab world. He also married and queened a totally hot American woman whose father headed the FAA in the Kennedy administration. You got it one-third correct.
Obama: the language of this name is Luo, a language of the Nilo-Saharan family, which makes it unrelated to the Afro-Asiatic family, of which the Semitic branch includes Arabic and Hebrew. Seriously not Arabic.
Yes. There were a few slaves. But that doesnt make "Remember that under the feudal system, in Britain at least, very many people were effectively slaves. " a true statement.
Wikipedia, which admittedly doesn’t know everything, says that Obama’s name is from the Semitic root B-R-K, not B-R-Q from which the Hebrew ברק is derived:
So while Obama’s first name isn’t exactly an “Arabic name”, it’s derived from an Arabic term which does have a Hebrew cognate, but which is not in fact the Hebrew name ברק.
Of course President Obama is black.
I believe what you meant to chime in with to create this zombie is that President Obama’s source pool for genes is not predominately recent sub-saharan ancestry.
Race categories in the US are self-assigned, and with good reason. You cannot define some sort of biologically-certifiable “race” using genetic markers. Nor can you assign it by pedigree, since the ancestors have the same problem.
Like I said - Google images of Obama senior. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY that person has anything more than a trace of ethnic Arab, unless one is suggesting that genes for race do not define appearance to any significant degree. He is exactly what he claimed to be, a member of a local ethnic group (“tribe”?) located in Kenya. Attempts to suggest otherwise appear to me to be the same as the “birther” movement, attempts to attribute to Barrack Obama something he is not. (“Arabs bad! Obama must be Arab!”) And from what little I’ve read, Obama Sr. never claimed to be anything other than Kenyan. His relations still mostly live in that area of Kenya.
Note that I am not suggesting President Obama is anything genetically. Just suggesting what the poster meant to, or should have, said.
If you want to know the makeup of his genetic source pools, you need to test for the relevant markers.