In self identifying as black the President is an ultraconservative who moves us toward the world of slavery rather than away from it.

          Here is the President's problem: He proudly and lovingly identifies with his mother and her parents but  the white side of his heritage disappears when he decides to be black. A man lauded as an agent of change embraces  the one drop rule, a way of thinking invented by slave traders and slave owners, the very worst  representatives of American culture.  

     The President has choices. He could again embrace our appalling past  by self identifying as "mixed race", a "half breed"  or a Hapa (a half from Hawaii).  He could also defy the past and follow the lead of many young people with, for example, African-American and Italian,  Chinese and German heritages.  Rebels  think of themselves as walking contradictions to the American "racial" paradigm. They refuse to accept the anachronistic and venomous language of slave traders by instead supporting  a definitional limbo. Better to be a question mark than branded with the lurid labels inherited from a still pulsating past. Consider Senator Harry Reid's just noticed remark that candidate Obama's advantage was his "light skin" and "lack of a Negro dialect".

    However unintentionally,  the President shook Reid's prejudiced hand when he chose black.  Both men walk backwards into the future and one result of their reverence for the past could be an enormous increase in the last thing America needs: More white and nonwhite people.

       Why? Because the President is not the only person in America making crucial decisions about his or her disposition toward "race" and skin color. Pressured by, among others, sociologists who preach the mantra of assimilation,  many millions of immigrants are also picking a skin color, even though they do not want what America is offering.

        Consider Latinos, 12.6% of our people in 2000, an estimated 24.4% of our people in 2050. In December of 2009, the Pew Hispanic Center published a report entitled Between Two Worlds. Spotlighting "how young Latinos (defined as men and women between 16-25) come of age in America", the report's section on "racial identification" notes that " a large majority of young Latinos do not see themselves fitting into the categories of race used by the U.S. Census Bureau". In 2010 no less than 76% of young Latinos self define as "some other race" (36%) or as Hispanic or Latino(40%). Those numbers resemble the choices of their parents in the 2000 census.

         But what happens if, like President Obama, the nation continues to think in black and white? It's not as if you can divorce one color from another. White is the silent role model for black. Indeed, American thinking is so bizarre that, despite being white, white people are not "people of color". That negative designation is reserved for African-Americans, for Pakistanis, for Chinese, for Indians and for anyone else (e.g., Arabs) who confuses Americans about the proper color of a person's skin.

       Meanwhile, white sits on a definitional throne, acting, in America, as the global  positive for billions and billions of negatives.

    Enter young Latinos. By initially choosing Latino or Hispanic they self define in terms of a pan ethnic identity. They reject "race" but, following the President's lead, they soon learn to define us by what divides us. The Pew study shows that if you are 26 or older, 30% of Latinos now identify as white. That's double the rate of young Latinos and the study assumes a slow assimilation into American culture. In essence, the longer Latinos stay, the whiter they get. Even uglier is the predictable judgments made by newly minted white people. Successful assimilation means that, having now selected the "right race" and skin color, Latino immigrants  simultaneously learn and internalize "stereotypical views of blacks as loud, violent, lazy, uneducated, dependent or lacking in family values."

   Again, you cannot have blacks without whites. They are super glued together and the situation is even worse for the millions of immigrants who never get one of the two primary colors. Whether lighter (e.g., Chinese and Japanese) or darker (e.g., many India Indians) than blacks, so called Asians have confused Americans for centuries. Anyone with forty-forty vision can see that they contradict our way of thinking but, instead of moving forwards, the advocates of assimilation ask these newcomers to be American afterthoughts. Like Governor Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, we call them "nonwhites", an eight letter obscenity because, as Albert Murray taught us more than forty years ago, the word nonwhite contains all the assumptions of white supremacy and segregation. Supremacy because "non" is by definition a negative; and segregationist because, as the reaction of "white" Latinos suggests, why would I want to hang around with black people, Americans who are -think of Senator Reid- still America's ultimate negative?

    The President's choice of skin color also underlines one of the cruelest ironies of all: In America only black people get to be both black and nonwhite. That's a despicable double whammy ; and an obvious indication of how far we have to go to reach a "post racial" America.

     It's as scary as global warming. A so called progressive President says yes to black, Latinos are saying  yes to white, and nonwhites multiply as we audaciously ask them to assimilate into a society that, by definition, locks them into a third class status.

    We need to trumpet a simple fact. In the 1950's Negro was the correct word for an African American. In the 1960's Black replaced Negro and, for the all the  long overdue social class and political achievements of so called people of color,  in 2010 the nation's preeminent black person still defines himself and 300 million other Americans by what divides us: The alleged colors of our skins.

  We are celebrating a fiction. And committing a cultural crime when we ask newcomers to turn themselves into white people.

      That's should be yesterday's America.

      So, the alternative is to tell the truth, to call "a spade, a spade". Like President Obama and Senator Harry Reid, in 2010 most of us still use the language and ideas of slave traders.  Rebels plead for the definitional limbo that is a bridge to change but how can they succeed when we have the temerity to see the 2008 Presidential election as a  sign of serious, rather than superficial cultural change?