Of course you don't.
Right
Wrong
He's known worldwide as American's first black president. He refers to himself as black, most recently on Letterman. The "One Drop Rule" is a highly ingrained part of our culture, and thus he is black, despite his split genetic ancestry. If you spotted him on the street and didn't know who he was, you would highly, highly, unlikely to refer to him as anything other than black. Before Obama became a nationally known figure, I will be hard pressed to believe that you used the term
mulatto in daily or even weekly conversation. When he was elected we saw black people partying and crying in the streets, and it sure wasn't because they were overwhelmed by the fact that the first mulatto was elected. <snort>
Perhaps, but if you look up the origin of the word and its general usage, you might not think so. There was a time when the term was important, or so it seemed at the time, but that time has long since passed, long before you and I were born.
It's slang for "non-white"
It's a name that only applies as slang. The term has never been used as a technical term for a race or mixture of races. Each race has a technical term, and "mulatto" does not exist anywhere within those technical names for any race. It's a derivative of a Spanish term for mule. It was initially used to mean a mixture of European ancestry (a.k.a., white) and anything non-European, and quickly became a mechanism for granting certain rights. The "One Drop Rule" continued as part of the actual law in many states, all of them southern, into the 1930's as a continued mechanism to justify racism and to restrict the rights of "certain people". This was part of the Jim Crow laws.
So, yes, the term "fits him to a Tee", but only in the proper context, that of Jim Crow racism.
Clearly, you have a need to use the term, to split hairs that he himself sees no reason to do. Myself, I prefer to simply call a spade a spade and be done with it.
