First "Black" U.S. President? Well....

The constant references to B. Obama as the first "black" U.S. President make me feel just as constantly uneasy. But then I am the weirdo who, in reaction to and because of intense and undying resentment of the experience of Jim Crow, long ago rejected any notion that I be considered and judged in any way on the basis of what I consider to be that bogus "black" thing. For several reasons my African heritage strikes me as being one of the least interesting and significant things about me, and I think the same applies to President-elect Obama.

I will farther compound my heresy by saying that I also consider Obama's election to have been already overshadowed when it comes to race stuff, by another event that happened here in Virginia a little while ago (actually 18 years). After all, the U.S. is the U.S., with large minority populations of many kinds all over the place, but Virginia was the heart of the Confederacy. The Secession of 1861 would not have succeeded had Virginia not finally overcome its justified but unfortunately weak reluctance, and, after Lincoln's call for troops, it finally joined the Cotton States in stumbling down the garden path to widespread death and despoliation of its own territory. Yet in 1990 it became the first state in the country, including the supposedly more enlightened northern states, to elect a so-called "black" governor, Doug Wilder. The fates then carried their ironies even farther by having him inaugurated in Richmond, which was nothing less than the capital of the Confederacy, and he served out his term there, uneventfully, and then later became that town's mayor.

You would think that in the universal references to B.Obama's skin color -- which must be what people mean -- the American electorate has suddenly become composed of millions of portrait artists, who need to know B. Obama's exact pigmentation so that they can squeeze the proper colors out onto their easels in preparation for mass painting sessions. But to get even a fair likeness they would be badly advised to use tubes marked "mars" or "ivory" or "bone" black. Instead the various ochres and umbers and titanium dioxides would be much more necessary.

Actually, in more than one way B. Obama is just as much of that other bogus thing, being "white," as he is of being falsely "black," and in fact even somewhat more so, because his "white" American side, those two strong women, his late lamented mother and grandmother, had much more to do with him turning out to be who he is than did his father's African or "black" side. So how did he get to be more "black" than he is "white?"

B. Obama was not elected to be an interesting portrait subject, and his good qualities have much more to do with his intellect and his character. He is, first of all, but to my mind most important of all, a man who is in every intellectual and moral way as far as it is possible to get from the badly chastened criminal who is now sitting so forlornly at the big desk in the Oval Office. That's the most interesting feature that I see in B. Obama.

He should be called instead the first sensible President-elect that we have had since W. Clinton, and sharper than the majority of those who have served in the office. But in that first respect the comparative range is a little short and therefore it doesn't have much of a ring, while the second may be judged to be much too far-reaching and therefore liable to tighten too many jaws. But it is still much closer to an appraisal that really says something.

Maybe, however, the main truth is that I just don't trust the ways of the world. So, when bad spots crop up during B. Obama's presidency, as they must in today's world no matter what, I fear that they will be blamed on his supposed "blackness," just as right now that feature seems to be seen as a crowning virtue, it is mentioned so often -- a view of things that to me ranks with the life span of a butterfly ...or a rainbow.