Here at Benzene we can never get enough of presidential trivia. In a post earlier today, Andrew Sullivan observes that if Barack Obama were elected president, he would not only be the first African-American president, but he would also be the first president who is a product of miscegenation.

If Sullivan's blog had open comments, he would no doubt be inundated with comments suggesting that President Harding had African blood. That's a popular theory, but as far as I can tell there's no evidence for it beyond wishful thinking. The idea was initially spread by Harding's opponents who thought it would be a slur against him. Nowadays it is perpetuated others who like the idea of there having been a black president. Harding himself — bless his worthy soul — never denied it. He said that he hadn't traced his ancestry very far back so he really didn't know if it was true or not. Historians who have looked harder have found no reason to believe it is. In my estimation there is considerably less evidence that President Harding was part Black than there is that President Buchanan was gay, another unproved theory that is sustained by wishful thinking.

My own comment would be to observe that although we have never had a product of miscegenation as president, we have had one for vice-president. Charles Curtis, who served as vice-president under Herbert Hoover (and before that served four years as Senate majority leader plus a brief term as President Pro Tem), was three-eighths Native American. He furthermore spent part of his childhood living with his mother on a reservation.

As one who is both a product and a perpetrator of it, I am of course a big fan of miscgenation. For those who don't know, my mother, my father, and my wife are of three different races. I am what people now like to call "Eurasian". When I first heard the term, decades ago, I was terribly confused. It seems to me that a Eurasian is someone from Eurasia. Near the beginning of my favorite musical, The Fantasticks, the narrator says of the naive young heroine that

Once upon a time somewhere I read an article which proposed that individuals whose ancestry mixes Black with Asian should be called "Blasians", a portmanteau so dreadful-sounding that it almost becomes graceful, in a comical, ironic sort of way. By similar reasoning, If my wife and I were to procreate, our children would be "Blurasians", albeit in proportions different from those of America's most famous Blurasian, Tiger Woods.

Andrew Sullivan speculates that having a mixed-race president might help lessen the prejudice against miscegenation. I wonder if we aren't already past that barrier. Pop music and professional sports are filled with individuals of mixed race.

The word miscegenation, by the way, is not formed from the prefix mis-. The first half of the word comes from Latin miscere, to mix, the same root we see in immiscible.

Some oversensitive and etymologically challenged individuals don't like the word. They figure that just as to mispronounce is to pronounce incorrectly, to misjudge is to judge incorrectly, and to misrepresent is to represent incorrectly, then miscegenation must be to breed incorrectly. No doubt some people believe that it is, but such judgment is nowhere inherent in the word.

Any objection to using the word would then be on the grounds that it sounds like it's offensive, even though it isn't — that is, the same argument commonly advanced against niggardly. My feeling is that such words need to be used more, not less.

In Tolkien's Return of the King, when King Éomer announces the engagement of his sister Éowyn to Prince Faramir, Aragorn remarks:

Ha. If it's good enough for the heir of Isildur, it's good enough for me.

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