Black and White

In the English language, people say 'black and white' and never reversely 'white and black', black always comes in front of white. The antonyms are in exactly the same order in Chinese.
Black is not a colour as there is simply no light in it, while white could be the mixture of all colours in the visible spectrum picked up by the stupid human eye.
Yet black is perceived by the human brain as something and white as nothing at all. So black seems to be dominant and white has to be recessive. No wonder some Americans are still wondering whether their current presidential candidate from the Democrats is 'black enough'.
As for determining a person's race, white has to be absolute in order to be pure, while black is allowed to have different tones. A genetic composition of 99.22% white is not really white, while 0.78% black could be enough to be black. One always can see black people in America with rather pale skin.
If Barack Obama does win the next presidency, the Americans and the world would like to say he is the first black president in U.S. history.
They say Barack Obama is black.
His skin definitely looks dark. Yet he is certainly not black.
Calling Barack Obama black according to his rather dark skin is literally incorrect, especially he had a white mother as a matter of fact. Saying it in a less traditional and convenient racial sense, he is at least half white. In such sense, to some African Americans, he can no doubt never be 'black enough'. Yet he is still a black man after all.
To be a male and to pass onto his children his genuine African family name, Barack Obama has copied his Kenyan father's Y chromosome, which has nothing to do with his skin colour. He thus inherited more genes from his white mother than his black father, as it counts far more genes in the X chromosome than in the Y one. The Y chromosome contains less than a hundred working genes, while the X chromosome has more than a thousand. Since Barack Obama has received the X chromosome from his white mother, so he should be considered a little bit white more than he is black.
In this great Western democracy, many nationals still hold a blind faith in a certain sort of racial purity. In this country where anthropology, genetics, genomics are widely and vigorously studied, some of the black population still have to dream for something Martin Luther King once did.
If you are 100% black, you are, of course, recognized as a black. If only one of your great grand parents was black, you are still black even though you actually are made up of 87.5% of white genetic stuff. It seems that the name of white hardly tolerates a few black genes.
Barack Obama was born to his white mother, who was an anthropologist by training, and who must have known very well what human races are all about.
Now no contemporary anthropologists would dispute on the fossil and genetic evidence that suggests humans originated in Africa. One of those cradles is Kenya, the homeland of Barack Obama's father.
Far away from this cradle of human evolution, a man and a woman genetically some 100,000 years apart met on a Pacific island, and they gave birth to a child. Now this child is running for president to lead not only that powerful part of the New World, but many parts of the Old World as well. The Americans, mainly white though, should give this black man a chance to create history for America, even just for the sake of creating.
Are the Americans ready for a black president yet? I think absolutely not. But, as they are not ready now, they will never be in the future, not after one presidential term, not after ten terms.
Barack Obama must have known that more than 12% of the population is black, and he also knows that many of the American blacks 'are still locked in this notion that if you appeal to white folks then there must be something wrong'. (Obama's own words) But if he does NOT appeal to the whites, then things could be even more wrong for him. So, how could he possibly balance himself in such a fully democratic country in which racism is considered absolutely wrong, yet existing just everywhere in many blacks' and whites' daily life.
Be it that he is elected, this 100% self-confident Barack Obama will surely not be able to sit as comfortably in the Oval Office, as his immediate predecessor is doing, or the previous romantic one did. He will have to manoeuvre one of the hardest leader-ships the States has ever sailed, simply because he is still recognizably black. And his being considered not black enough will only add to his difficulties that he should have anticipated and enjoyed.