It’s old news in the sports circles, but admittedly I am a little behind. Nonetheless last year’s article by CNBC-SportsBiz writer Darren Rovell concerning the Marathon winner who was not American enough to be celebrated was quite revealing.

In an apology, he explained:

I said that Keflezighi’s win, the first by an American since 1982, wasn’t as big as it was being made out to be because there was a difference between being an American-born product and being an American citizen. Frankly I didn’t account for the fact that virtually all of Keflezighi’s running experience came as a US citizen. I never said he didn’t deserve to be called American.

Now isn’t that interesting? Only by a technicality should this African who became a USAmerican be celebrated because his “running experience” happened after he was a US citizen. Yet had Keflezighi come to the US as an adult as previously believed, then the celebration somehow would have been overblown.

Isn’t it obvious that we are often exercising a prejudice against those who are not like us, even if they are “legal”?

This man was African, not “native-born” and therefore somehow deficient, his accomplishments notwithstanding.

But then I remember one of the most celebrated American runners, Jesse Owens, whose greatest contribution may have been his deflation of the Aryan myth of the physical superiority of the white race, by winning four Olympic Gold medals in 1936 in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Yet when at home in his own land this “man of color” was not afforded rights available to “white folk”. He just was not “American” enough”, I guess.

So we should not be surprised, then, that many “good, white folks” do not consider another American who spent some of his early years in Indonesia “American enough” to be the President of the United States.