Is Barack Obama an African American?

Question: How do you see this idea of black people's thought and activities as the focus of black history in parallel with the discussion of self-naming and racial identification that begins in Chapter One? Is there some kind of relationship between the contemporary debates over categories of racial identification, and the historical legacy that defines people of African descent/black Americans/African Americans as a group? And how does this problem of self-naming look differently when we consider someone with a background and a personal history like our President's? What does African American history mean for African American studies

Answer: I am an outsider looking in this situation because I am not of African American decent or white. Identification in this country is hard to come by in this country because we live in such a mixed melting pot of cultures. As years pass races tend to mix more and more with each other. I think that it is hard to understand who you are and how to be accepted when it comes to identifying to a specific race. I believe that people should not focus on " how black" a person is, but rather take in consideration that if that person has African American blood just a little, than they should part take in the culture regardless. I think people need to focus on how this country is constantly changing and how eventually it will have to look past segregation of races, because it still occurs till this day.