Which do you think we'll have first - presidential poll

[xultar]

[Buzz Clik]

1. I am hoping for "president with ambiguous ethnic heritage and confused sexual orientation"

[xultar]

2. That would be me.

Just kidding I'm obviously a black gay man trapped in a womans body.

[RiverStone]

10. What about Androgyne Pat - from Saturday Night Live???

Is she ambiguous enough?

[peace13]

3. I am hoping for one that is actually elected by the people. n/t

[xultar]

4. Wouldn't that be nice for a change.

[Spider Jerusalem]

5. I don't know...

the way the demographics have been shifting in recent decades, we might have a Hispanic/Latino president before either a black or female president.

But Obama is very promising...not quite ready for prime time yet, I don't think, but certainly VP material for 2008 (he's young, yet, after all, and two terms as VP would make him the 2016 candidate pretty much by default).

[xultar]

7. I thought about that right after I posted. I didn't have Hispanic or Latino.

That was my bad. I think you may be right. A Hispanic man or woman especially from Texas would probably beat a Black person from any state to the oval office.

[valerief]

6. I think it's the physically challenged candidate if white, male, and

Christian. We've already got the intellectually challenged white male Christian in the White House.

[WI_DEM]

8. If it were Obama vs. Hillary I think Obama would win

the nomination and have a good shot at winning the election.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. Define "black". The absurdity of racial classification.

Given that whites have decided who is "black" has been decided by whites for centuries, it's a pretty difficult equation. But, it's a great indicator of the grip that racism still holds in this country. On a further note, there are undoubtedly plenty of "whites" walking around today who don't realize that under those classifications they would be considered "black". And, if unfortunate enough to live in the ante-bellum south, could have been sold into slavery - as many were.

From Wikipedia:

Quadroon, octoroon and, more rarely, quintroon were historically racial categories of hypodescent used in Latin America and parts of the 19th century Southern United States, particularly Louisiana. Quadroon (from the Spanish cuarterón "quarter") denoted someone of one quarter black ancestry: a person with three white grandparents and one black grandparent. Likewise, octoroon denoted a person of one eighth black ancestry, and quintroon (quint- here implying "fifth generation") or, less commonly, hexadecaroon described a person of one sixteenth black ancestry. The terms were also used in Australia to refer to people of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry.

This cultural classification differed somewhat from the "one-drop theory" current in most of the United States, in that it recognized a higher social status for black-descended persons by degree of majority white ancestry. Nevertheless, persons of minority black ancestry in these cultures were still heavily discriminated against and often subject to slavery.

In the United States, the Jim Crow laws generally followed the "one-drop theory"; hence the case of Homer Plessy, a Louisiana man of one-eighth black ancestry.

By the latter 20th century, these terms had almost totally faded from use, being generally considered racist and obsolete.

Famous quadroons and octoroons

A number of notable people might have been described as quadroons, or might have been had they lived in a time or culture where such words were current. These include the French writer Alexandre Dumas, père, the Brazilian writer Joaquim Machado de Assis, actress Carol Channing, singer Mariah Carey, the NCAA Florida Gator champion Joakim Noah, Wentworth Miller, Patrick Francis Healy, Vin Diesel, Cassie, and Sally Hemings. Famous octoroons include Alexandre Dumas, fils, Henriette DeLille, Aleksandr Pushkin, Homer Plessy, and Peter Ustinov.