Yes, I Know that the President is Black.

I spent the first 5 years of my life in Garland, TX, surrounded by as many different ethnic groups as you would see at a UN council meeting. My brother and I played with a group that included white kids, black kids, two brothers from a Hispanic family, and a Korean boy. There were no minorities or racial issues - just kids who wanted to have fun. (Every child should be so lucky.) I kept this attitude when I moved to a different city where black people and white people treated each other very differently; I found this racist behavior very perplexing, because I believed that racism was something that we only studied in history books.

In responding to President Obama's Sate of the Union Address, MSNBC's Chris Matthews says that he "forgot Obama was black" for an hour. When he was informed that this was a rather odd statement, he commented that Obama was creating some sort of post-racial society in which we couldn't see color, anymore.

I already live there. I don't consider Obama's speeches in the context of black society or as the words of a representative from another culture. Our modern understanding of biology has informed all but the most foolish among us that racism has no foundation; the differences between a white person and a black person are as minor as those between and blond and a redhead.

Of course, I learned all of this on the playground when I was a kid. I hope that Obama's skin color will eventually stop being the only thing these people notice about him, because we can't be in this "post-racial" society until people like Chris Matthews stop bringing it up.