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Neglecting the benign?

Following-up on Scott’s post, one could make the argument that the reason “that despite the Obama campaign, no one is talking about race very much” is that according to recent reports America already had its first black president, and we’re not talking here about Bill Clinton. From Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: Will Americans vote […]

Following-up on Scott’s post, one could make the argument that the reason “that despite the Obama campaign, no one is talking about race very much” is that according to recent reports America already had its first black president, and we’re not talking here about Bill Clinton. From Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:

Will Americans vote for a black president? If the notorious historian William Estabrook Chancellor was right, we already did. In the early 1920s, Chancellor helped assemble a controversial biographical portrait accusing President Warren Harding of covering up his family’s “colored” past. According to the family tree Chancellor created, Harding was actually the great-grandson of a black woman. Under the one-drop rule of American race relations, Chancellor claimed, the country had inadvertently elected its “first Negro president.”

In today’s presidential landscape, many Americans view the prospect of a black man in the Oval Office as a sign of progress — evidence of a “postracial” national consciousness. In the white-supremacist heyday of the 1920s (the Ku Klux Klan had a major revival during the Harding years), the taint of “Negro blood” was political death. The Harding forces hit back hard against Chancellor, driving him out of his job and destroying all but a handful of published copies of his book.

And there is the speculation that America actually had five black presidents.

Moreover, as Wonkette suggested:

Of course, even if Harding weren’t black, Barack Obama still could never be a real black president, since he’s half-white, half-East African and has no slave ancestry.

BTW, I don’t recall anyone getting too excited when Americans elected their first German-American president, who had been in charge of the U.S. victory over his ancestors’ powerful military empire.

And apropos Nazis and U.S. presidential candidates. According to the Nurenberg Laws, Barry Goldwater was Jewish (his grandmother was). In fact, based on Israel’s Law of Return, Goldwater would have had no problem making Aliyah to Israel.

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