Tears kept coming to my eyes yesterday. The reggae singer Cocoa Tea's anthemic song Barack Obama played on repeat as I sat writing this, the dulcet chorus eliciting pride and a sense of what yesterday's achievement truly means.

As a Black Brit of mixed-race with an African father and a white mother, I feel a profound personal joy in Barack Obama's elevation to the most powerful position in the world. It is a momentous and historic day, and his inauguration is an undeniably potent and uplifting symbol of change, hope and emancipation from the shackles of mental slavery caused by racial injustice.

But hang on a minute. Let's not get too carried away. Believe it or not, I am beginning to get tired of hearing that President Obama is black. With apologies to King Lear, blackness is apparently all. Every radio bulletin and TV report laboriously emphasised his blackness above all else. Historic? Certainly. Overkill? Undoubtedly.

The media's fascination with his quasi-messianic negritude is on one level emotionally understandable - but it also mawkish and intellectually facile. To drone on ad nauseam about his blackness is reductionist, offensive even, telling us far more about the media's perceptions of black people than about Mr Obama himself.

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BACKGROUND

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Without doubt, race is an important part of our terrestrial journey, but it is not, and never should be, the defining element of the human condition. To reduce President Obama to his skin colour is a form of racism, as it is fundamentally demeaning to his humanity and to his plethora of talents and abilities that have little or nothing to do with his race. It's dispiriting that we can send men to the Moon and to the bottom of the ocean but we are still incapable of transcending our obsession with race.

President Obama's intellect, his Ciceronian eloquence, his prodigious political acumen and his acuity of vision - these qualities are of much more significance to his presidency than the colour of his skin. They will be the qualities that will determine how he is remembered in the annals of history - and they are the ones we should be concentrating on.

Today is a victory not just for black people, but also for universal human dignity and the struggles of the oppressed the world over. As the Latin playwright Terence, an African slave from Carthage, wrote: “I am a human being and I consider nothing human alien to me.” So let's heed Terence's words and end our fixation with the new President's colour.

Hail to Obama the man, not Obama the black man.

Lindsay Johns is a writer, broadcaster and cultural critic on Colourful Radio

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