Azizi says, "By now, most people know that Senator Barack Obama has an equal amount of White ancestry as he does Black ancestry. Yet, he identifies himself as an African American.... [Nader labels] Obama as a 'Black candidate' who is 'tryin to act White'.... [Nader says] that Obama is 'half-African American'. Maybe times really are changing, but in the United States, if not elsewhere, saying that a person is half-African American is like saying that a woman is somewhat pregnant. Either you are or you aren't."

I see the "half African-American" quote on the page you linked to, and I also see on the Rocky Mountain News site that Nader calls Obama "a black American", so it would seem that he does understand that, in the US, a person of mixed cultural heritage is most often categorized as "black" if one of the components of that heritage is African-American.

Personally I think it is a shame that that is so. The terms "black" and "white" are instantly polarizing, and imply that two races (among the many) are somehow opposites. "African-American" would seem to imply mixed race (whether voluntarily or involuntarily on the part of the person's ancestors); however it's my understanding that "African-American" could also refer to a person of purest African ancestry who is an American citizen. Please correct me if I'm mistaken about that. But if I am correct, the term is fraught with danger of misunderstanding.

"White", on the other hand, is a complete inaccuracy because there's no such thing as a "pure" white race (although white light contains many colors of the visible spectrum -- that, at least, may be racially descriptive of "whites"!). We "white" people ought to be as insistent on acquiring a politically-correct label for ourselves as we are careful to address others by their PC terms. Is "Caucasian-American" taken?

Anyway, I don't see a problem with someone's describing a person with one African-American parent and one Caucasian-American (or European-American, or whatever the PC term ought to be) parent by saying that that person is "half African-American" and/or "half Caucasian-American". Of course I see a problem with Nader's using it to say that it's "the only thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate" and to use it to denigrate the man (if you'll pardon the pun), but Nader's an offensive bigmouth and that's old news. I heard him speak in 1975 at the university I attended, and he was offensive then, and he's never ceased to be offensive. However, if the term "half African-American" is used purely as a descriptive term for one's immediate ancestry, I don't see it as equivalent to "half pregnant". I don't even see it as an indiscretion when describing a public figure who has made his ancestry plain.

Actually, Nader's use of it may signal some social progress (slow progress, but progress nonetheless). It's certainly a step forward from the term "mulatto"! I don't remember the press parsing the sections of the family tree of Thurgood Marshall or even Colin Powell -- they were just labeled "black" and that was that -- but nowadays people seem more aware of and more interested in cultural background in general, like fans' curiosity about the ancestry of Tiger Woods or Keanu Reeves or Mariah Carey for example. Seems that the nation's "race dialogue" is gradually becoming more of a dialogue than a rant. Those who still do rant -- like Nader -- are becoming the ones whom society wants to control.