Observers of U.S. politics may recall references to President Bill Clinton as the "first Black President," though perhaps not the origins of those references. My impression is that Princeton's Professor Toni Morrison may not have been the first to describe him that way in print but this paragraph from a 1998 New Yorker article is often cited as the source of the reference:

African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and--who knows?--maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us."

Due to perceived similarities in popular/folk culture, personal affinity for/by Black Americans and vulnerability to an unfair mauling politically arising out of a Southern, right-wing political machine, many Black Americans felt a great deal of sympathy for and loyalty to President Clinton.

But then came Senator Obama and the close-quarters political knife-fighting between the two in the South Carolina Democratic Primary, with mutual recrimination and race-baiting, one, twice or three times removed.

I think that if Black Americans award a non-Black person the status of "honorary Black," they retain the implicit power if not moral authority to revoke it nunc pro tunc. It would appear that South Carolina may have done so, with Black primary voters in that state choosing Obama over Hillary Clinton approximately 5 to 1.