If it were Condie or Colin? What then

[timinfla2]

I don't know, and I really don't want to get sucked into the racial aspect of all of this other than to agree with dpvandy that there's a double standard here and fortunately some of us non-msnbc watchers are smart enough to call it for what it is.

 

[tmhudson2]

I associate "Arab" as a middle Eastern ethnicity.

Kenya is a wee bit south for an Arab country, isn't it?

Many arabs were/are coastal traders, along the east coast of Africa, east to India and Indonesia. They were also slavers. I once heard that Saudi Arabia didn't officially outlaw slavery until 1967, under pressure from the U.S. (Slavery was permitted under Islam, and is still considered legal by some Islamists, which may be why so few Arab leaders have condemned the enslavement of Christian and animist black Africans in southern Sudan by the Muslims of northern Sudan.) Many of these traders intermarried with local black African women; this was permitted and to some degree encouraged by Islam.

I don't know if Obama's father's roots stem from these coastal trading arabs or not, and certainly am not stating that he may have had a slaver in his ancestry. Just stating historical facts.