@Schafstelze @Wifiwits @thomasfuchs It’s true that “blackness” and “whiteness” in racial terms is not only, or sometimes at all, about skin tone; the words are misnomers.

Fun fact about me regarding Obama’s skin and race: as an Australian who had only the vaguest, broadest level of interest in US politics at the time, when Obama first came to prominence as a candidate, his blackness didn’t even occur to me; I literally just thought of him as the smarter, more progressive one until someone pointed out the *reason* that some monkey caricature of him that got used was so offensive was the racism. It just hadn’t occurred to me until that moment how race was a factor there. (This is not a virtue signalling“look at how colourblind I am”; our racism in this country is different, is all, so I didn’t recognise it at first in that situation at that time.)