His True Believers have been conditioned to shout down all opposition with cries of racism, and that gets tedious, as does their claim that he's the "first black president."

Songwronger is playing rhetorical head games, he hates Obama so much that he doesn't even want to credit him as the first African American to break through the color barrier and make it to office. Perhaps he feels that Obama was elected because of all of those 1960s knee-jerk liberal civil rights folks and he wants to try to take away what he thinks they were voting for by suggesting they were too dumb to know their country's history or to acknowledge men of color in the office in the past.

What a jerk. He posts an opinion piece to start this pseudo-discussion, without a single citation with it, nothing to back it up, and suggests that everyone in the nation was in on it during those earlier elections, all knowing that other presidents with (apparently substantial?) black ancestry were in office and no one cared.

Blood quantum is the term used when American Indians argue about Indianness, how much is enough to be included in some tribes, and yet an individual can be 100% "American Indian," because they are half Sioux and half Blackfeet, they are kicked out of both reservations because you can't have the mixed blood. (That is a made up example, but true life accounts of this abound.) If you really wanted to know about his blood history, he should have been an Indian because Indians themselves have been put in the position by the greater American culture and the absurd treaties with each nation to fight over who gets the crumbs. African Americans were never offered landed settlements like reservations so the fight is different, but there are many cognates between the two. America has a long history of breaking down percentages of blackness, down to terms like "Quadroon" to assign percentages.

From Wikipedia:

Quadroon, and the associated words octoroon and quintroon are terms that, historically, were applied to define the ancestry of people of mixed-race, generally of African and Caucasian ancestry, but also, within Australia, to those of Aboriginal and Caucasian ancestry. The terms were used in law and government to provide a precise code of discrimination and the determination of rights. The use of such terminology is a characteristic of hypodescent, which is the practice within a society of assigning children of mixed union to the ethnic group which is perceived by the dominant group as being subordinate.[1] The racial designations refer specifically to the number of full-blooded African ancestors, emphasizing the quantitative least, with quadroon signifying that a person has one-quarter black ancestry, etc.

Hindsight and DNA may reveal family histories for previous presidents that show mixed-race ancestry, but either they were unaware or they were passing, because it did not turn up during elections or they wouldn't have been voted into office under the racial biases in place in the U.S. through history.

Songwronger uses logical fallacies to set up discussions then presides over the mess like a demented puppet master. Next time he starts a thread, let it drift off the page without a single response.

SRS