Now that Barack Obama has succeeded in his unlikely quest for the presidency, we have a few months before Inauguration Day to indulge in our favorite national pastime -- obsessing over race.

After dancing in the streets, linking arms across race and class and engaging in the longest "Kumbaya" moment in American history, we proceed to the 2.0 version of the nation's oldest, tiredest argument.

Talking about race seems churlish in light of the last few days, doesn't it? Our previous fixation on the nation's Original Sin seems out of keeping with the post-racial tenor of the times.

With the "Bradley Effect" now officially dead and buried under a sea of blue on the 2008 electoral map, why resurrect the racial shibboleths of the pre-Barack era as if they had any relevance?

With all due respect to Bill Clinton, we just elected America's first black president. Or did we?

Even before the fashion police could slap the cuffs on Michelle Obama for wearing a "fashionably ugly" Narciso Rodriguez ensemble to her husband's landslide, e-mails and phone calls poured in from readers concerned that the "white" half of Barack's identity was getting short shrift.

We've seen this sensitivity to racial taxidermy before. When Tiger Woods took over the golf world a decade ago, he famously referred to himself as "cablinasian" -- a blend of Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian -- to avoid paying the mandatory NAACP surcharge that year.

The white golfers Tiger was beating the hell out of were relieved that they weren't really being spanked around Augusta by a "black guy" after all.

Mr. Woods began self-identifying as "black" once quotes like "I was born a poor cablinasian child" started turning up in Sports Illustrated.

Fortunately, his experiment in freestyle racial identification wasn't taken up by the son of a white Kansan woman and African graduate student from Kenya.

From the time he was old enough to have a say in the matter, Barack Obama has self-identified as black. Not "Kansenyan" or "tragically mulatto." Black.

The problem with those who are offended by headlines proclaiming the election of America's first "black president" is that they're still thinking in terms of old American categories where "black" negates other racial strains.

Being "black" in America has always implied being a hybrid of some sort, whether of African descent or some other departure from the ideal of undifferentiated whiteness.

If having a parent or grandparent of another race disqualified one from being "black," there would be far fewer blacks in America than are currently on the books.

As it is, there are millions of "blacks" in this country who refuse to check that particular box on the census forms. Because they're fair-skinned, they self-identify as "white." They just want to "punk" the racial profilers.

Ironically, Americans have tried to make hard distinctions along the continuum of race before, usually with linguistically disastrous results. Who wants to be called an "octamaroon," no matter how technically correct it is by the niche logic of the 19th century?

And "biracial" sounds a little too much like "bisexual" to the excessively image conscious. Still, "black" isn't about biology as much as it is a social construct that encompasses our interracial realities without identifying every loop of DNA by name.

Think of "black" as the racial equivalent of the polite universalism of the Unitarians. As a social construct, it may be idiotic on some level, but it means well.

Barack Obama has been many shades of "black" during his political career. In recent weeks, he has been called redder than Che Guevera sunning on a Mexican beach. Meanwhile, the truly ignorant accuse him of being "an Arab" in league with Osama and Satan himself.

At the beginning of the campaign, he was taunted for being "too white" by blacks suspicious of his exotic background, education and ambitions. Many wondered whether he was "black enough" to even relate to them. It was pure lunacy.

Perhaps Barack Obama's greatest genius is in being like the weather. If you don't like his racial classification at the moment, just wait. It will change. Besides, if President Obama does a bad job, he'll be "black" again before you know it. And nobody will care.