I've been mistaken for a valet: Obama
Barack Obama, the United States' first African-American president, has revealed that he has been mistaken for a valet because of the colour of his skin.
"There's no black male my age, who's a professional, who hasn't come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn't hand them their car keys," Obama told People magazine on Wednesday.
His wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, added that her husband had also once been mistaken for a waiter at a black-tie party and asked for coffee.
Not that Michelle has not experienced the same kind of thing. She said that when she went to Target recently, as the First Lay of the country, she was asked by a fellow shopper to get something from a shelf.
"I think people forget that we've lived in the White House for six years," she said. "Before that, Barack Obama was a black man that lived on the South Side of Chicago, who had his share of troubles catching cabs."
Obama and the First Lady were speaking in the wake of rising racial tensions in the country following the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in State Island, New York. Both men were killed at the hands of white policemen. Both policemen did not face any punishment.
The president said racial relations had improved, but progress was needed.
A Bloomberg Politics Poll that surveyed 1,001 US adults between December 3 and 5 found that 45 per cent of black people thought that race relations had deteriorated under the US' first African-American.
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