GIVE IT UP FOR THE WHITE MOTHERS!!!

Several oddly accusatory e-mails today about my Barack Obama altered calendar images.

Part 1 -- who asked you?
Part 2 -- everything I wrote is what I feel. Imagine that, me saying what *I* feel in my own calendar (or journal).
Part 3 -- the man IS half white; this is a fact; this is a fact being strangely, deliberately, repeatedly, consistently segregated from all public life, media, acknowledgement, recognition, MENTION in the face of all the

"hail our first African American President" hoo-rah.

I've had enough of it.

The man's mother was WHITE. WHITE. Hear me? You can't doubt my sanity -- our President himself has said so, though not as frequently (recently) as once-upon-a-time. The man himself is not BLACK, or AFRICAN AMERICAN, or WHITE -- he is a mixed-race individual.

The man's mother was WHITE. WHITE. Hear me? Just like I am. All my since-becoming-a-mother life, I've had the majority of people (not a part of my intimate circle) assume my sons were NOT my own -- that I was the nanny, the caretaker, the school teacher, the baby sitter, the neighbor on watch, but mother? Never. When my oldest male child was 18 months old, an elderly white woman followed me around Target and finally started screaming for security, accusing me of child-napping him, because in her mind my skin color and his just couldn't possibly be connected. David, of course, clung to my neck hollering, 'Mommy!!! Mommy!!!!' And even the security guard shook his head and gently helped Our Concerned Citizen away.

Nowadays, though, it's just the surprise I see on my sons' friends' faces, the one who haven't met me before, or who see me with Double BB and assume I must be the girlfriend, mistress, second wife, whatever, but mother? Never. One early-20's Black girl came in our home to purchase David's old TV. When she saw me on the couch, she actually stepped back, hand to her chest, and said, 'Oh! My!' Upon entering David's bedroom to check out the equipment, I heard her ask him, 'No way -- that's your Mom?'

This is ridiculous.

Why is Barack Obama our first 'African American' president?

Why was Halle Berry our first Oscar winning 'African American' actress? Her mother is white, too!

Why aren't they both, more appropriately, our first TRULY AMERICAN representatives -- representative of the melting pot culture Americans have always claimed, back through history and down to our day, with such pride?

The Reverend who gave the closing invocation, after President Obama's acceptance speech, had my full attention during his prayer, and I was even laughing when he got playful at the end -- 'black is gonna come back, brown is gonna come around, yellow's gonna be mellow, red's gonna get ahead' -- but when he mentioned white, he said, 'White is gonna get right.'

I WAS LIVID. Excuse me? Whites still aren't part of the team?! Whites are still on the guilty seat, still heaving the heavy 'it's all our fault' boulder up the hill ... ??

What about that man you're praying for there, Oh Reverend Sir? What about the White part of him? Does that 'gotta get right' along with the rest of us pale faced folk? Or are you conveniently forgetting all about that color running through his veins simply because you don't see that color on his face? Or on the face of my sons? Or the myriad other mixed-race kids everywhere and anywhere you look in this modern society of ours? Or are we just supposed to overlook that, the White part of Barack Obama, because that seems to be the trend now that he's been elected, been sworn in, become the hero?

For me, it's false advertising when one part of a person is blown out of proportion and another is stuffed behind a door in everyone's mental room. What kind of damage are we doing to Barack Obama, all this emphasis on only a part of himself? Or on his daughters? Or on young men and women like my sons, who still are forced to CLAIM A RACE (& the law still requires it to be the MINORITY race dominant within them) on every stupid piece of bureaucratic paper work everywhere they go?

What: HUMAN isn't good enough, not even now?

And when do we white mothers of mixed-race young people start getting our collective nods, anyway?