A recent AP News article states that many people do not perceive President-elect Barack Obama as a black man. He’s described as bi-racial, multi-racial, blah, blah, blah. The author Christopher Hitchens claims that he is just as white as he is black and that he is not the “first black president”. If I am not mistaken, Hitchens grew up in the U.K. and not the United States, more specifically, not below the Mason-Dixon line in the U.S. So, perhaps I should give him a pass on this one. In this country, it isn’t what you actually are. It is all about what people see. Perhaps Hitchens missed the innumerable death threats Obama has received in the last few months, or perhaps he neglected to see the number of Americans who would not vote for Obama simply because they thought he was black — and to be fair, the number of Americans who voted for him for the exact same reason.

You know what? Technically, these people are right. Genetically, Barack Obama is not a 100% black man (in this country, who is 100% anything?). But, right now Obama has a 79% approval rating in his handling of the transition from Bush’s administration to his own. 68% of the country has confidence in the president-elect, according to Gallup. He’s doing really well with American’s at this point. But the pessimistic side of me can only think that as Obama’s approval rating goes down, the blacker he’ll become. And if he ever achieves the cellar-dweller numbers of Bush, he’ll be darker than Wesley Snipes. It’ll go from “he is the perfect example of what America is. He is multi-racial, multi-cultural. His is the face that represents the portrait of the American landscape” to “See? I told you not to vote for his black ass. He was genetically disposed to pull us into the crapper.”

I truly, truly hope that I am wrong. But this country has seemingly come a long way in a very short amount of time. And I have to be cautious in thinking that humanity has truly taken a turn for the better.