The best part about blogging is that you don’t have to be a journalist or an author with an officially recognised website. You can be mister or miss anyone, have an opinion and post it on your own blog.

While there are many blogs out there that are onlines diaries, many others that are ramblings on certain topics and, unfortunately, another set that are basically irrational, illogical rants about peoples they don’t like (I accidently stumbled on an anti-Semitic blog once and it left a really bad taste in my mouth), there are some amazing blogs, collections of thoughts and reflections meant to point out the illogicalities that tend to rule some peoples’ lives.

Here is an article from one such blog that is not only amazing to read, but that engenders amazing conversation. For anyone who happens to have a youth group or anything of the sort: this is the type of article you can take to the youth group and have a great discussion with.

“Is Barack Obama black?” – A response to an AP article on this topic.

Is Barack Obama black?

Anytime you hear a question like this, one thing is absolutely certain:  the person they are talking about must be (or have been) a great success.  In this case, the subject of the question happens to be the next President of the United States of America.  President elect Barack Obama came literally out of no where to defeat Hillary Clinton and the Clinton machine, as well as those “mean old Republicans”, to win the 2008 presidential election in a landslide.

But what if Obama had not won?  What if news had come out that Obama had a secret white mistress who accused him of rape and abuse?  Would white America jump to say he wasn’t black then?  Would Americans from mixed backgrounds leap to say he’s one of them, or he’s raceless?  Would news periodicals and the AP run stories claiming “Many insisting that Obama is not black”?  Or would they run front cover images of him darkening his features?

I wonder what the reaction would be if these same people, who now claim “Barack Obama is not black”, were to have only known the Barack Obama of the 1970s?  What would they have said about him when he had an afro, played high school basketball,  drank, experimented with drugs, and was “casual” about his education and future? (as his mother put it in Dreams from my father).

He still had a white mother from Kansas, and he was still raised mainly by his white grandparents.  However, something tells me that those same white people and “mixed” people would not be as enthusiastic about claiming him as one of their own.  I can just hear them referring to him as that BLACK burden to an otherwise “good family”.  To some, he might serve as  evidence as to why white women should never ever sleep with black men (because they produce such awful offspring).

Read the rest of this great post here.