ArcaMax

When the Olympic Games come sprinting into Paris for their most recent sweaty installment, among those carrying the Olympic torch will be Snoop Dogg, American rapper and stoner superieure.

Snoop's leg of the run will take him through the streets of Parisian suburb Saint-Denis. It's a rough neighborhood, the kind of place where someone will bust a baguette in your escargot just for dissing his mama's croissants. I mean, they will spill the Bordeaux on the streets, le yo!

Snoop will remain untouched by all this, and not just because he's so stoned he doesn't know what country he's in. He'll handle the whole thing with his usual brand of sleepy-eyed indifference, vaguely ironic sneer and slightly childlike glee. That same mix is what we hope for if Kamala Harris debates that brightly colored beachball Donald Trump.

All true Snoop Dogg aficionados know that Snoop's principal value to the human race arises from four distinct things.

No. 1: The music. Snoop's been rapping since before your grandpa died in prison. With his music on the sound system in my RAV4, I can roll down the street smoking a cheap cigar and sipping a decaf oat milk latte, and I've got cool I haven't even used yet, yo!

No. 2: Snoop makes everything cooler. Martha Stewart. The dying Girls Gone Wild franchise. Anything.

No. 3: The man looks like a big skinny lizard.

No. 4: He makes everything cooler.

American Blackness sets the standard for cool all over the world. If you lived in Europe, would you want to be Brad Paisley or Cardi B? Don't make me le chortle. The answer is tres obvious.

Snoop's color is therefore related to and may be central to his coolness. White Americans ceded cool to Black people long before we let 'em vote. Big mistake for white supremacy, too. Coolness, not ideology, rules the world, and no matter how fast we push coolness into the box, it comes popping back out the bottom or the sides.

There is no debate about Snoop's Blackness. He says he's Black. You say he's Black. The music says he's Black. Brad Paisley would probably say he's Black.

Kamala Harris has it rougher. As far as I know, she can't rap, and her Blackness (or lack of it) is already being debated by the same kind of people who used to maintain the insane American racial classification system that resulted in terms like "quadroon" and "octoroon."

For those of you whose school district didn't teach any kind of race theory, a quadroon was a person with one-fourth Black blood, while an octoroon had one-eighth Black blood, although the last term was often used for people with any Black ancestors.

We gave up those words, but we still parse and examine the blood quotient of any person who is to obtain any kind of leadership position. We don't care too much about sports and entertainment because white people lost that battle a long time ago, but we still need to know if someone running for office has a shot glass of Black blood in their veins or a quart.

We have computers and smartphones and use them to advance the racial theories of centuries past. Snoop and Kamala are both running, but he's going to have an easier time of it because we know what he "is," and here in 2024, we still have to know.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.