A specification

To LD and to whomever it may concern.

Perhaps my remark about Obama repudiating his mother and grandparents was too scathing. Not a good one. I didn't mean it as a personal repudiation, but as a racial one, and it came from these lines of an interview to Barbara Walters:

BARBARA WALTERS, "THE VIEW": Your mother was white. 

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Uh-huh. 

WALTERS: Would it be helpful or why don't you say I am not a black president, I am biracial? 

Here was Obama's telling response:

OBAMA: You know, when I was young and going through the identity crises that any teenager goes through, I wrote a whole book about this…Part of what I realized was that if the -- if the world saw me as African-American then that wasn't something that I needed to run away from. That's something that I could go ahead and embrace. 

OK, I realize, as you made me remark in a previous occasion, that being Italian I might not have the required American sensibility to racial matters. I can understand that in the USA it is enough to be half black to appear all black. And this is what Obama embraced.

What I wanted to say with my remark is that in this way he embraced racial America, and, being thus incapable to represent a post racial America, rekindled racial matters rather than assuaging them.

Sorry that I made it sound as a "personal dig", as you say. It is true that I don't like the guy, but for a political argument this is not here nor there.

HP