Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black. We call him that — he calls himself that — because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between… To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.

-Washington Post editor Marie Arana, who today took comments from fans and critics here

My colleague Ms Williams touched on this story briefly last week, but it went unnoticed, so I'd like to bring it up again, because I think it raises a lot of interesting questions.

At last Tuesday's annual State of the City address in Denver, dozens of attendants were surprised when vocalist Rene Marie, who had been hired to perform the national anthem, instead sang "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing," perhaps better known as the "black national anthem." Nobody but Marie, her husband and a friend of hers knew she was going to switch the songs, and a red-faced John Hickenlooper, Denver's mayor, said he was "disappointed and confused" by the performance.

I think we can all agree that Marie is ballsy, but was she in the right? To me, sedition like hers – a surreptitious hijacking of a public event – always seems misguided and counterproductive. But in a time of a shameful dearth of public protests, perhaps I should be thankful it happened at all—beggars can't be choosers, right? What are your thoughts?

Condoleezza Rice spoke positively last week about Barack Obama's race speech, so positively (considering the man she works for) that she must have really, really loved it. She takes issue with the idea that black people supposedly don't love their country just because they criticize its racist past (and present). She also calls our America's racial history the country's "birth defect."

"There is a paradox for this country and a contradiction of this country and we still haven't resolved it," Rice said. "But what I would like understood as a black American is that black Americans loved and had faith in this country even when this country didn't love and have faith in them, and that's our legacy… My grandmother and my great-grandmother, and my father, who endured terrible humiliations growing up — and my father in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and my mother's family in Birmingham, Alabama– still loved this country….But if anybody believes that black Americans love this country any less than white Americans do, they ought to go and talk to people who live under very tough circumstances, sometimes doing menial labor and doing tough jobs, and really all they want is the American dream. All they're focused on is is their kid going to be well educated enough to go to college and have a better life than they had."