How we peg Obama may tell more about us

So how do you refer to Barack Obama? And why?

Do you call him African American? Black?

What about multiethnic? Longer than black, shorter than African American.

I'm not here to call right or wrong; I'm here to ask.

Some who think themselves witty quip that "we're all multiethnic." Shallow. Multiethnicity involves not genetics but awareness. Multiethnic people are aware of their ancestry and consider it part of their identity.

Obama's ancestry is as European as it is African. He knows it, foregrounds it, tells the story. Yet the media, old-schoolers that we are, call him "America's first viable African American presidential candidate." He is routinely called "black," never "Anglo." (Never.) Maybe it's that, if you look dark, even somewhat dark, people call you black. (You can substitute almost any color in place of the word black.) Some say, not without cause, that the media stress his blackness out of an American habit, born of Jim Crow and the "one-drop rule," under which, if you had any African descent, you were all African.

I hope not. "One drop" is an outgrown way of thinking, obsessed with tracking how much, in what amounts, by what relations "bloods" are "mixed." It believes in purity and pollution. Keep score! Keep the lines clearly in view, all percentages, all derivations!

What do we gain, what have we ever gained, by such compulsive housekeeping?

A lot of such housekeeping went on a while ago, with the question of whether Obama was "black enough." He lived abroad until he was 10, then was raised by his maternal grandparents in Hawaii, where he attended a good school. That allowed him (so some said) to avoid the challenges and obstacles too often in the way of blacks. An uneasy argument, if you follow it out. It assumes that, to be black, you have to be damaged, and if you're not, you're not black enough.

Obama's multiple ethnicity gets played the other way, too. The McCain campaign will, as it must, exploit voters' discomfort with the Obama difference. When that campaign calls McCain the "safe" candidate, sure, they mean McCain has more experience in foreign policy. But what makes McCain "safe," really, and Obama "unsafe"?

Ethnicities, alas, don't always intermix willingly. When Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (from Kenya) courted Ann Dunham (British ancestry, Kansas), their families didn't like it. Obama and Dunham didn't listen. Their marriage, though it did not last long, did give birth to a singular American life.

Multiethnicity can indeed yield very interesting, worthy lives: Consider Malcolm X, Tiger Woods, Naomi Campbell, millions and millions who are not famous. There's resistance: Some people (of all backgrounds) still don't like crossing the (more and more imaginary) race line. Not that "race doesn't exist." It does, just barely: Genetic science shows that while race-based differences exist, they account for only a very tiny amount of difference among people, about one quarter of one percent, in biologist Richard Lewontin's formulation. What exist only in our minds are the "lines" that demarcate the races. Those exist only if we let them.

The media, and some voters, are having trouble placing Obama because he muddles the lines. And to be sure, he uses his multiethnicity to advantage, presenting himself in different ways to suit different audiences. Such a person faces us with the future - and let us remind ourselves that the future is often the unrecognized present. The world that's coming . . . check that . . . the world that, for millions and millions of us, is here, now . . . what will it be like? What is it like?

It's one in which we are not blind to ethnicity, mono- or bi- or multi-. Why ignore something that can shape you, body, soul and story? Value it, though, as something that makes each person singular and unrepeatable, to be celebrated and respected. Not as a divider, a test of purity.

A person's descent is always interesting - but never determines anyone's intrinsic worth, should never create divisions to be feared and policed. That future, for millions of us, is already here. It's a break from the past, and if we are not there ourselves, it's up to us to catch up.

What you call Barack Obama reflects where you stand on all this. So . . . what do you call him? And what does it matter?