When I was a kid growing up in Texas—and into my late 20s (from the 1950s into the late 1960s, shoe-shines were almost an exclusively black occupation—White barbershops, which were off limits to black customers and black barbers, had black shoeshine “boys” (often elderly men, but still called “boys”).

If Glenn Reynolds grew up in Alabama, he must be aware of this phenomenon—Alabama was much worse than Texas in racial discrimination.

In fact, the Texas Supreme Court in Austin had an official shoeshine squad of elderly black men as late as the mid-1970s.

The fact that the term shoeshine “boy” is used necessitates the fact that black men were the occupiers of these positions. Black men were never men during the Jim Crow years—only “boys” no matter how senior they might be to their white employers.

In short, to post President Obama as a bootblack (the official term for this occupation) is inherently racist. Such racial branding has also been perpetrated by the left in depictions of Clarence Thomas and former Secretary of State Rice.