Why is Barack Obama black?

On the 4th November 2008, Barack Obama became the first black president of the United States. However born of a white mother of Kansas and a Kenyan father, only his black side is proposed, whereas he is scientifically biracial, or “mixed-race”. Why is he considered black? The media have continually said that Obama became the first black president of the United States but it would be quite accurate to say that he is the 44th president of the United States. Yet the only way consider and define Obama as a black is to accept a cultural definition rather than a scientific. In France, one would tend to want to declare Obama like a “mixed race“, but it never will be written that he is the first “mixed-race“ president. Thus, Barack Obama is black, because he defines himself as black and the American society does the same. This American specificity has to be highlighted.

Barack Obama, 42 years old, was born in Hawaii in the United States. His mother, Stanley Ann, white and from Kansas, was an 18-year-old college student, whom parents had left Kansas to Hawaii. There his mother met his father, Barack Hussein Obama, whose Obama is named after. His father was a Kenyan, who gained a scholarship to study in Hawaii. Mister Obama already had a wife and family in Kenya when he married Stanley Ann, Obama’s mother. When Obama was still a baby, his father got a chance, that is to say a scholarship, to study at Harvard, but the family had no money to go with him, so he moved to Harvard alone. Then, he returned to Kenya alone to work at the government as an economist, and the couple divorced. Obama saw his father just once, when his father came to visit him. He was 10. His mother married later an Indonesian man, when the little Barack was 6, and all the family moved to Jakarta. Ann got a daughter Maya with her second husband. Obama lived in Jakarta for 4 years and then returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attend to school.
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