"on obama"

this is a piece by our former regional ethnographer, tony paredes, with an ethnographer's look at obama---really great---the link is to a newsletter through which one must burrow to find his article, but it's worth it

Something doesn’t set quite right in calling Barack Obama “the nation’s first African-American president.” Actually, it is anthropological errancy. It fails the Boasian challenge of uncoupling “race” and “culture.” Sure, Obama is the first “person of color” elected president of the United States of America. The closest to that before President Obama was Herbert Hoover’s Kaw Indian Vice President (1929-1933), Charles Curtis. Indeed, Barack Obama succeeds a presidential line-up of the “whitest of the white.” All were of northwestern European descent. Collectively, Obama’s predecessors were primarily of Anglo-Saxon origin, spiced with a healthy dollop of Celtic ancestry and a dash or two of German and Dutch as well. Eighty-eight percent (88%) of the first forty-three presidents were blue-eyed (Google it, dear reader), something made startlingly clear to me on viewing an exhibition of presidential portraits.

he understands rednecks, too