>>Fair question. How about his having come out of a single-parent family and earned his way to Harvard Law. It's not that hard to get into Harvard or Yale* when your father and your grandfather went there, but when you're a poor, mixed-race kid from Hawaii, not so much.
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>Wouldn't being an intelligent mixed-race/minority make it "easier" to get in to most universities (you know, they're big on diversity)?

Intelligent may not enter the equation. There are majority discrimination programs at Harvard that open the doors to minorities regardless of ability to pay.