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Michelle Obama: Part cracka-ass cracka

Just yesterday, I was watching the trailer for that Chris Rock movie Good Hair, and I thought to myself, Michelle Obama does have some good hair.

Because black women are obsessed with hair, or their lack thereof, I know I've read - probably on Sandra Rose - that Michelle Obama has some bizarre ritual to keep her fro nice and silky. It wasn't a weave, or any chemical relaxer (i.e. "creamy crack") I'd ever heard of, but it may have been coconuts or some shit. It sounded like some ol' bullshit to me, even then, but what do I know about black women's hair? I'm probably about to learn as much from Good Hair as white people.

As it turns out, the source of Michelle Obama's good hair is probably cracka-ass cracka ancestry. The New York Times conducted and investigation into her genealogy and traced it back to a black woman, a slave, who had halfrican children with a white man, possibly her owner - though at least one of her children was born post-slavery, thus suggesting that this miscegenation wasn't what Whoopi Goldberg would call rape-rape.

Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor who got arrested this summer for going home while black, who himself has been known to partake in some miscegenation, and who claims to have discovered through DNA testing that he's only 50.6 percent black, as if that's possible (I guess he didn't want to have any problems with his job in the black department at Harvard), has a post at the Root today with all kinds of fascinating information about black people here in the US' mixed-race ancestry.

For example, did you know that there's hardly a black person here in the US that isn't at least part cracka-ass cracka?

African Americans, just like our first lady, are a racially mixed or mulatto people—deeply and overwhelmingly so. Fact: Fully 58 percent of African-American people, according to geneticist Mark Shriver at Morehouse College, possess at least 12.5 percent European ancestry (again, the equivalent of that one great-grandparent).
[...]
For African American Lives, I’ve tested 21 African Americans, possessing a range of phenotypes—from a person who could “pass” for “white,” and whose father actually did, to people with darker and more traditionally African features, such as Don Cheadle and Chris Rock. Not once has any person tested turned out to be 100 percent African.

If Don Cheadle isn't completely African, you have to wonder who is completely African. Yeah, he does have an incredible (and not just for a black person) command of the English language, but still. Don Cheadle is darker than a motherfucker.

In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery [New York Times]

Michelle’s Great-Great-Great-Granddaddy—and Yours [The Root]