I didn’t say it. Morgan Freeman said it. In an interview with NPR to promote his latest film, The Magic of Belle Isle, the popular Oscar-winning actor said that people “conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president — he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”

Freeman implied that it’s Obama’s white side that’s the problem. This clearly fits the definition of racism: an ideology of racial superiority and hierarchy.

Freeman wasn’t the first person to comment on the blackness of President Obama. A TIME magazine opinion piece from 2007 carried the title “Is Obama Black Enough?” The article cited comments similar to those of Freeman:

“‘Obama’s mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan,’ Stanley Crouch recently sniffed in a New York Daily News....