Madam, - Jerry Crowley (May 20th) asks how "black" Barack Obama is, given that he has a white mother and is thus "genetically" as much white as black.
In fact, any genetic variation between people of different colours is minute, but the social significance of skin colour is not.
In a specifically US context, if Barack Obama were 10 years older he would have been riding at the back of the bus had he visited the southern United States as a child. While the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s has considerably improved matters, skin colour is not yet irrelevant and Senator Obama is still most definitely black.
In an Irish context, given his (maternal) Co Offaly Church of Ireland ancestors, he is of course a "black Protestant"! - Yours, etc,
SÉ D'ALTON,
Palmerston Road,
Dublin 6.