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.

Thing is, Obama really has more right to call himself an "African-American" than black Americans who call themselves "African-American" but were atually born to parents whose parents were born in America (and their parents were born in America, and *their* parents were born in America, and so on back to 1800 or so). Obama's not "half African-American" - he's half African, and half American. I don't discount the desires of black Americans to rediscover their forcibly-erased history - that's perfectly valid. But there's a big cultural difference between a black American seeking to rediscover their historical roots and a black American who genuinely did grow up in Africa.

If Nader can't see the difference here, and it seems he doesn't, then in trying to appear sensitive to "black issues" he's actually showing his lack of cultural awareness.

And as far as Obama having a "strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos" goes, maybe Nader wants to have a think about what's the biggest problems facing America today. An apparent inability to conduct foreign policy without everything ending in bloodshed, a war in Iraq which is turning into Vietnam Mark II, over-reliance on ideologically-opposed countries for national energy supplies, failure to fund aid organisations (foreign and domestic) if the aid organisations don't match the fundamentalist-Christian ideology of the current President, failure of a market-driven national grid - boy, the list just goes on and on, and that's just the top few I can think of off the top of my head as a Brit who doesn't even live in the country! Compared to those, is economic exploitation in the ghettos top priority? Possibly not.

Graham.