This just in

[weaktwos]

A researcher claims that Obama's Ancestors may have owned slaves.

Doesn't that make him even more qualified to be president? After all, some of our Founding Fathers owned slaves.

All kidding aside, though. Given the practices of certain slave owners, aren't some "authentically black" Americans related to people who owned slaves?

I mean, can you control who your great great grandfather was? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, people. Should it matter where you come from in America? I thought it mattered what you do and where you're going, here.

Comments

[eyow.livejournal.com]

Parents and grandparents, though, can have an impact on one's views of the world, in a way that ancestors who are dead before we're born are less likely to have.

Yeah, but I really think it's more important to see how the person acts now. My grandfather is a racist homophobic jerk, and I'm really not. I wasn't the most open-minded person when I was younger, either...but that's also not who I am now, by any stretch of the imagination.

[scarcrest.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- they CAN have that impact. My grandmother and some of my mom's side of the family still use the N-word regularly. I wouldn't watch the Oscars with my parents this year because I didn't feel like listening to them grumble about Ellen being the host, or any potential shot of Melissa Etheridge and her wife, nor did I feel like arguing with them about it.

I do think candidates who have near relatives who are seriously flawed in some way should speak to the issue. But I'm not talking about guilt by association. (I didn't think Mel Gibson was an anti-Semite just because his father was a Holocaust denier, but after his DUI, I do. That was his own words damning him.)