George Rodriguez, I understand what you were trying to do with your recent LA Times Op Ed article. President Obama is indeed bi-racial. His mother is white and father is black. Yes, if you want to think of the President as a symbol and not as a person then yes, if he had put down multi- or bi-racial as his race on the census it would have been the politically correct thing to do.

As you pointed out in your column, but you kind of listed as a negative, Obama for most of his life, identified himself as being black. You stated a lot of true historical reasons for him doing this, but you did what a lot of people do when thinking in racial terms, especially when it comes to black people, and assumed the thinking of today is the thinking of yesterday.

That is definitely not the case.

Your reaction reminds me of the same uproar that occurred when Halle Berry declared her daughter, in time could decide what her racial designation could be, but as for now she would consider her daughter black. People in the generation like Obama, Berry and myself (I'm slightly younger than Obama, just younger than Berry) are in a very unique situation. We straddle a racial change in the country. From the time we were born until just after we graduated from high school, we went from colored, black then African American. That's a lot of name changes in a twenty year span. While we were kids during the Afro fist pumping 60s, by the time the 80s ended we were not only shaking our fists to Fight the Power, but we were starting to see real power within the black community. In that time span we went from imagining a black mayor to seeing viable Presidential candidates, and they were black.

Our history, and by that I mean the collective American history, hasn't been too kind to multi- or bi-racials. We have had to pick one, all the time, and the determination of what we are would depend on our surname or color of our skin. Someone who had a Hispanic mother and a white father with the name Henderson would probably be considered white. Switch the order and have the surname as Hernandez and they would be white. Just look at the Sheens. No one thinks of Charlie Sheen as Hispanic, or Martin Sheen for that matter. But Emilio Estevez, yes, he's Hispanic.

Our generation, like it or not, still has a foot in the old ways. We do straddle the fence, but it can be tough for us to acknowledge a multi- or bi-racial heritage. When outrage was being waged by some over what Halle Berry said about her daughter, I saw articles that spoke of her in terms of being black, even though her situation is similar to Obama's. Her mother is white, father is black and the father wasn't in the home. Now, think about growing up in the 60s and 70s, which we kind of look back with Brady Bunch eyes. The reality for those two and many other bi-racial children would have been a little different than opening arms by people to embrace their full heritage. What most in society would see would be this white woman taking care of a black child. Yes, black child, because remember there was no multibox option for employment, for school enrollment and the like. You had to choose and if you looked black, you would be black.

Yes, in a perfect revisionist world Obama, Berry and others would have been bi-racial children and there would have been no stigma to the designation but that wasn't the case. So yes, when Obama went to Chicago he wasn't going to take the time with everyone he met to explain in detail his biological heritage. In reality that might have helped him in the black community but hindered him in the white community, because it would have been odd for them to look at his black face and see him as white. I had a friend in high school whose mother was Dominican, his father was white and it was impossible for anyone not to know he was bi-racial because he had one blue eye and one brown eye. His sister had two bright blue eyes. Think of the confusion that brought up with people.