On an unusually warm November election night, “Blue America” was trans-fixed to the streaming video coming out of Chicago’s Grant Park: 125,000 starry-eyed Americans of all races blanketed the grassy expanse to celebrate the election of our first “African-American” President. Barack Obama’s supposed kinsmen were positioned prominently in the front rows: notably Oprah Winfrey, sighing, hugging, splashed out in red; and Jesse Jackson, weeping, towering in his presence. Obama appeared and began his victory speech:

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,””

The crowd roared with approval.

Halfway around the globe, well beyond the shadow of skyscrapers, in the placid town of Nyangoma-Kogelo on the shores of Lake Victoria, the President-Elect’s half brother, surrounded by beaming clansmen, slaughtered a bull in celebration.

“We are going to the White House,” they sang

Later, the crowd placed a reef at the tombstone of Barack Obama Senior; it said “you have birthed a king.”

Two continents, two realities, two assertions of ownership existing side by side - yet seemingly oblivious to each other.

Throughout his brilliant campaign there was not much question in the mainstream media that Obama was an authentic “black” American. After all, he played basketball, fist pounded, spoke elegant ebonics, graced the covers of “Ebony Jet” and “Vibe” and lived on the South Side of Chicago. Kenyans were those awkward, serious people who won marathons. The nature of his “foreignness” was never fully considered, as evidenced by the impotence of claims (or accusations) on Fox News and elsewhere that Obama was a “Muslim”or an “Arab” The right wing nuts were asking a valid question this time, but there seemed to be a disconnect with the American people. And the Left lampooned them, as seen in the controversial cover of “The New Yorker” of Mr. and Mrs. Obama in “terrorist” garb.

Truth be told, in both his heritage and upbringing Obama is more distant from the “black experience” in America than most white Americans. He can make no claim to have inherited the legacy of slavery. His father was a Luo tribesman, a Kenyan, an East African, and - yes -a Muslim. Obama grew up post-segregation in Kansas, Indonesia and Hawaii in non-black communities. In young adulthood, he coasted off to the Ivy League: Columbia University and then Harvard Law. Social Theorist Malcolm Gladwell has pointedly defined Obama as an “Outlier,” a person who defies our conceptions of achievement. He doesn’t bear the stamp of a poor immigrant, a defined minority group, a geographic location or a specified class. In American terms, he defies categorization.

So why do Americans of all colors unquestioningly identify our President-Elect as African-American? What if he were white with a European father? After all, a whiff of Swiss in John Kerry in 04 helped sink him; and before him the Greek-descended Dukakis was deemed too “ethnic” to beat Bush Senior. The answer, I believe, is in the monolithic view of “blackness” passed down through American history and propagated today largely by African-Americans.

As a young instructor at the University of Chicago, Obama eventually settled, married and had kids in Hyde Park, Chicago. I myself was raised and schooled there and am intimately familiar with the racial mores of those environs. Despite Hyde Park’s “progressive” attitudes toward race relations relative to the rest of the country (it has large numbers of interracial couples and proportionate numbers of blacks and whites), it is still trapped in the discourse inherited from slavery, reinforced by the legacy of housing codes and successive waves of black migrants from the Deep South in the first half of the 20th Century. And the University of Chicago, a mostly white bastion, in the largest contiguous black community in the U.S. is hardly a paragon of town-gown relations.

As in America, black identity in Hyde Park can be neatly distilled by the “one drop” rule: anyone with a black descendent is automatically black, no matter what the other parts of his make-up. Hence, blacks in America have been “the people of the rest” as I like to say. This legacy is clear if you open a picture-book of great African-Americans throughout history: from the fair, straight-haired Josephine Baker and Thurgood Marshall; to the red-skinned of Malcolm X and “Red” Foxx; to the jet black skin and “negroid” features of Louis Armstrong and Sidney Portier. The fact that members of Obama’s sole line of American ancestry participated in and benefited from Segregation is inconsequential in this schema.

While other aspects of racist thinking were jettisoned by the Civil Rights movement (like the fact that Blacks were naturally docile), the one drop rule has remained socially en force. How else can one explain the tiny uptick in Black - White marriages since the two peoples were integrated? Or the uncommon instances of Black-white sexual imagery in our otherwise increasingly risqu media? Or the unilateral labeling of Tiger Woods as “African-American” despite his repeated clarifications (he’s half Thai)?

In a good way, one drop has provided a sense of unity for African-Americans: despite differing skin color, features, or social class they could find comfort and political enfranchisement in a common identity. This wasn’t the case under other systems of Aparthied, where racial underclasses were played off one another. South Africa, for instance, was once White, Colored (mixed), Black and East Indian.

Perniciously, however, one drop has also allowed for the preservation of mythologies and reductionist ideas about blackness. How else can a Republican Vice Presidential nominee get away with accepting a hypothetical post as “Ambassador to Africa”? It’s all one big jungle right? Joseph Conrad was more influential than we think.

Sadly, many African-American intellectuals have used their bully pulpit as representatives of the world’s most influential group of black people to super-impose these stark categories of chattal slavery to all parts of the globe. Harvard Historian Henry Louis Gates is a leading voice in this respect. I wince every time he claims he’s going to Africa to study “black folk” (can you imagine a white historian saying he’s shuttling to Europe to study white people?). And his academic title is presumptuous: Chair of the department of “African and African American Studies.” Gates, while visiting the Horn of Africa for a PBS Series - and seeing people with black skin and kinky hair claim they were “Arab” - professed he’d discovered a form of black self denial (it had to be black as opposed to Swahili or Tigre etc); perhaps it never occurred to Gates that in that part of the world paternal ancestry determines identity. Conversely, there are white people in the Levant who claim to be “Arab” for the same reason. Perhaps these were the “white men” that Malcolm X met on his famous Haj - men that he predictably described in his autobiography as “White” by rigorous Southern standards. In any regard, they weren’t accused of denying their “whiteness.”

This program of Afro-centrism reached its absurd height in the early 90s when Martin Bernal’s “Black Athena” sparked a social activist campaign to appropriate the ancient Egyptians for Black America (in effect that’s what it was). It was inconsequential to these Afro-centrists who massed in front of museums with signs saying “Nefertiti was Black!” that Egyptians always drew a distinction between themselves and the darker Nubians to the South; nor that the slave ships that brought Africans to America came from West Africa. What mattered to them, was that Egypt was whitewashed in Euro-centric imagery - a fair point - but not grounds for ownership. One drop could fill the gaps in one’s imagination. After all, this was Africa!

Nowadays, Liberals and African-Americans will respond to my argument by posing the tried and true empirical question: could the ancient Egyptians have sat in a caf in the Jim Crow American South? Surely, many could not; but so too not many Southern Italians. In keeping with the empirical approach, others will point out that Obama’s undeniable African-American looks are all that matter. If this were valid why has there such outcry among many African-Americans that top universities have been filling diversity quotas with first generation Africans and Afro-Carribeans? Surely, historical grievances in the U.S. are not redressed by flying an Ethiopian halfway across the world and handing him free ride to Princetonbut, curiously, this logic doesn’t apply to the Presidency.

So too, African-Americans and liberals will cynically claim that playing up Obama’s white ancestry is a political tool for Whites to only concede “half” the White House to African-Americans. But my point is that even half is too generous. The latter are truly represented in Michelle Obama - maiden name Robinson - truly the first African-American First Lady. But the President came from somewhere wholly different. He’s an outlier.

Make no mistake, I’m not denying the existence of Race as a collection of physical features shared by a given people originated from a specific geographic region. I’m just saying that ethnicity is much more exact as a determinant of affinity. African-Americans to my mind are now an ethnicity, descendents of a West African, American Indian and European diaspora incubated in the American South. By that standard, President Obama is an adopted son.

The paradox is that registering Obama’s Kenyan heritage at the expense of his self-constructed African-American identity would make his rise to the pinnacle of the world more remarkable. This fact is not lost on the reporters who visit Nyangoma-Kogelo and see the poverty and disenfranchisement of the Obama clan.