So where's my white folks??? Cheney and Barack Obama related

To be honest the only real news about Dick Cheney and Barack Obama being related is that yet again we see a person from a different background is treated quite differently from we
Black Americans.

Just like the central yet undiscussed fact that he bears his own family's African name (which by definition of our experience, Black Americans do not) Barack Obama's blood tie with Dick Cheney is not through enslavement. Instead it's through white families up to and including his mother, who conceived him with a continental African, from Kenya, to be precise.

What of we millions of Black Americans? Up to the present no white American (nor European) politico has yet bragged of or publicly mentioned their family relations with us. And yet that area is such fruitful turf! Through my own arduous and emotionally tortuous family research I've connected with maybe two or three white relatives from my mother's family. Luckily, they've been good people. Mind you, a bit like Mr. Obama, these folks were not slaveholders. They are not related to my family through slavery, but through my white female ancestors in Tennessee and North Carolina. In another part of my family, my maternal grandfather confided to me forty years ago how his white cousins came to eat and play at his mother's home in Leavenworth, Kansas. But when they turned twelve, with no warning, they just stopped coming. My grandfather added that some of the white kinfolk moved from Leavenworth to New London, Connecticut where they took jobs at a federal naval base. This was 60 years ago, at least.

Speaking of our so-called "first amendment rights", scores of Black Americans have suffered serious consequences just for mentioning family knowledge such as this. With today's noose threats going on all over the USA one only hopes and prays that nowadays we'll no longer be killed simply for acknowledging our family connections to so many white Americans. But make no mistake: you still can be made to suffer negative effects, and our Black families taught us life-preserving information that isn't found in the U.S. constitution.

Every Black American who has ever run for anything is related to and/or "connected" (a euphemism for slavery) to a lot of white Americans. And a lot of white Americans also are related to prominent Black Americans. Roberta Flack comes to mind. Some people think she's from Washington or Virginia but she's born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, near Asheville. I know because a branch of my family is from the same Southern Appalachian mountains. Virtually all Black Americans are related to a lot of white people, both in the US and back to Europe, back to pre-colonial times. We'll see whose families get traced next, and next time it has to be those of us Black Americans, white Americans, and American Indians who come from our country's historically multi-racial families.