User:CouldOughta

Page started 1 May 2007 CouldOughta 03:24, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Arguments for Not Calling Barack Obama "Black" or "African-American"

He's not African-American, he's Mulatto/Biracial/Mixed, so we should call him that.

African American includes people who are of mixed race. It includes people whose African ancestors were not slaves (despite disagreement from some race theorists). It includes Americans whose African ancestors were not Americans. It includes Barack Obama. And it is used by the overwhelming majority of our reliable sources.

Mulatto is a more precise term, so we should use it.

Mulatto means a person of mixed white and black ancestry, often meaning 50% white and 50% black, but also can refer to a person with black and white mixed in any ratio. It also includes non-Americans. Thus it is not more precise. It also is considered demeaning by many. African-American is used by the overwhelming majority of our reliable sources.

Biracial/Multiracial/Mixed/Mixed-Race is a more precise term, so we should use it.

These terms also include racial mixes among Asians, Indigenous Australians, Eskimos, and depending how you define race, Latinos, plus others. African American only includes black Africans (Yes, the term excludes white South Africans and North African Arabs and so on.) So African American is the more precise term. Plus, it is used by the overwhelming majority of our reliable sources.

Person of African Descent/Afro-Caucasian/Luo-American/Other Term I Prefer is a more precise / better term, so we should use it.

Note that there is no Wikipedia page for Person of African Descent, Afro-Caucasian, Luo-American, Other Term I Prefer, and so on. This is just a clue that the term you prefer is not superior to African American, which is a term known and understood by the overwhelming majority of English-speakers. Plus, it is used by the overwhelming majority of our reliable sources.

African-American mixes a continent with a country! We should call him Kenyan-American.

First part right, second part wrong. Barack Obama's election would still be just as historic/noteworthy if he were a Ugandan-American. It's his being African-American (which he undoubtedly is) that makes this all a big deal. That's why the overwhelming majority of our reliable sources use the term.

We shouldn't call him African American just because he calls himself that.

We don't. Quite the opposite: if he called himself white, we'd still call him African American, if the overwhelming majority of our reliable sources continued to use the term. Self-identification as African American only would be the determinant if the matter was otherwise indeterminable. (For an example, see G._K._Butterfield, whose effective race is pretty much the result of him picking one (not legally, perhaps, but effectively, judging by the photo.))

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Response from MartinUK moved to the talk page. Further comments on the above are invited there.

What we might write if we were going to reference the birther conspiracies on the main Barack Obama page

(in the cultural and political image section, no need for a heading paragraph)

An oddity of Obama's public image is a set of persistent rumours that he was not born in Hawaii but in Kenya, and therefore is ineligible to be president, or that his citizenship has somehow lapsed. Believers claim that conspirators faked Obama's birth certificate and birth announcements. The rumor has persisted since mid-2008 and was an issue in early 2011 for contenders for the Republication Presidential nomination.