re: Not being rhetorical: Why is Obama considered black?

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Racial Integrity Act of 1924- The Racial Integrity Act required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth and divided society into only two classifications: white and colored (essentially all other, which included numerous American Indians). It defined race by the "one-drop rule", defining as "colored" persons with any African or Native American ancestry.

It did have a "Pocahontas exception"—since many influential "First Families of Virginia" claimed descent from Pocahontas, a daughter of the Powhatan, the legislature declared that a person could be considered white even if he or she had as much as one-sixteenth Native American ancestry. By comparison, during the 19th century, the legislature had defined that a person with one-eighth or less African ancestry could be considered white.

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