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Obama snubs NAACP, cites nonexistent scheduling conflict in avoiding convention

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The black leaders that attended the NAACP Convention here Thursday heaped praise on Vice President Joe Biden for a heated morning speech, but one question quietly pervaded the gathering: Where was President Obama?

Obama’s decision to skip the annual convention in the heat of his re-election bid has been a point of constant speculation here in recent days, providing a sort of microcosm for how the black community views the nation’s first African-American president as he nears the end of his first term.

“The people here overwhelmingly supported President Obama, would have loved to have President Obama here. So there’s definitely some disappointment about that,” said Dedrick Muhammad, director of the NAACP’s Economic Department.

Convention organizers said the president’s office cited a “scheduling conflict” as the reason he couldn’t attend. (Obama spent today in Washington D.C., and has no major public events.) And the president did make an effort to ensure the convention that he hadn’t forgotten them, appearing in a brief, pre-taped video praising the organization that aired before Biden’s address.

But one former Obama administration official noted to BuzzFeed that the move looked like a snub.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: The Rick Smith Show

Morgan Freeman: “Obama’s not black!”

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Since he burst on the national political scene, Barack Obama has faced questions about everything from his place of birth to his college transcripts — but his race?

Oddly, apparent doubts about the president’s racial identification now are being raised not by his critics but by one of his strongest supporters: Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman. He told a surprised NPR interviewer this week that the United States has yet to see its “first black president.”

Freeman was trying to make a point that some people oppose Obama because of his race, when in fact, the actor argued, Obama is “mixed race” and not African-American.

“First thing that always pops into my head regarding our president,” he said “is that all of the people who are setting up this [racial] barrier for him … they just 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.”

Traditionally, Americans of mixed racial heritage are allowed to decide for themselves which, if either, of their parental communities with which to identify. Obama has self-identified as an African-American from an early age.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo credit: Cesar Mascarenhas