Jack & Jill Politics

Oh snap! Barack Obama and Warren Buffett are distant relatives!

According to their family trees, the two men who at times shared the stage together during the 2008 presidential campaign are seventh cousins three times removed.

Genealogists at ancestry.com announced on Tuesday that Obama and Buffett are related through a 17th century Frenchman named Mareen Duvall.

…

The discovery was made by accident when the same team of genealogists who had researched Obama’s family tree went on to investigate details about Buffett’s relatives.

“We recognized the name Duvall and it made us wonder if this was a connection,” said Anastasia Tyler, the lead researcher on the project. “So we started focusing on Duvall.”

As much as I would like to believe this sort of thing makes news for the right reasons, for reasons to demonstrate just how close humanity really is, I’m fairly certainly this is yet another case of white people the people running things protesting a bit too much on matters of diversity.

Never do you read headlines about the various public figures of color who the Obamas may be related to. No; it’s always these white people who they are kin folk with and the tone is always one of being utterly wowed as if a biracial man and a descendant of the forced African diaspora (read: slavery) sharing relatives with white people is something to drop a jaw about.

But there’s the rub with all the post-racial confetti that’s been tossed about since November of last year.

As I said a few days ago, from the dominant culture’s perspective, the trend has a whole lot more to do with seeming an acceptable member of the dominant culture than it does with human progression that sees beyond race’s limiting confines. Shorter Toussaint: ‘Post-Racial’ is a hip, multi-culti version of white.