He stares out from Newsweek magazine. Yes, Barack Obama is everywhere. And the headline, “Black & White,” goes to the heart of what people try to avoid but can’t seem to escape when talking about him: race.

That’s understandable in a country that’s been struggling to reconcile ideals with action for most of its existence.

His campaign to become the Democratic candidate for president has brought record donations and threats, huge crowds and heavy security.

“How Barack Obama is shaking up old assumptions,” the rest of the Newsweek cover headline reads. The first one might be, what does it mean to be black?

When I wrote about his recent Spartanburg, S.C., speech – on the importance of fathers in a young person’s life – readers’ responses approved of his message but not my description of the Illinois senator.

An angry caller left this: “He’s not black; he’s mixed race. I believe his mother is white and his father was black, so it doesn’t make him black. It makes him mixed race.”

“He is what we used to refer to as ‘mulatto,’” wrote one reader. “I always thought that he was a white man. OK, 50 percent white,” another said.

I usually don’t identify people by race unless it’s relevant. In this case, a frank message about the need for strong black males made in a black church, I thought it was.

As for the decision to call Obama black, it was not mine.

On “60 Minutes” in February, he spoke of his “realization that the African -American community, which I now very much feel a part of, is itself a hybrid community.”

“It’s African. It’s European. It’s Native American. So it’s much more difficult to define what the essential African- American experience is, at least more difficult than what popular culture would allow.”

So Obama claimed his blackness while expanding the idea of what that means.

Just the fact that we’re having this discussion is progress of a sort. For many years, categorizing by race was the government’s choice and duty, and it often sliced the racial line particularly thin, with labels that measured the so-called “one drop” of black blood that doomed citizens to discriminatory practices.

Now, census forms offer choices. It’s an acknowledgement that few people of any race – if you look deeply enough – are pure anything.

My son – an African-Norwegian-English-Irish-Native American – checks the little box marked black on those rare occasions when he has to check anything at all. He knows that choosing one doesn’t mean denying the rest.

My husband says: “It prepares him to deal with the realities of growing up in the United States.” My son has never suffered slurs or stereotypes about being Norwegian. About being black, well, that’s a different story.

His best defense, his best chance to grow up confident and strong is not to answer with, “You don’t understand; I’m not really black.” It’s to learn the history that puts a lie to the slur. It’s to have a conversation with aunts and uncles who can give firsthand accounts of real-life bravery.

We’ll be even further along as a country when what you call yourself carries pride, but leaves all the baggage behind.

The 2008 presidential campaign still has quite a ways to go. I expect I will write about Obama again. I probably won’t mention his race each time I do, but if it comes up, I will respect his choices.

This first appeared as a column in the Charlotte Observer.