This is an experiment everyone could benefit from, what if you were an African American? Just think of the very practical differences in your life.
As regarding the little one in the White House:
He would not be the son of a President, thats for sure. Unless someone wants to make the case that George HW Bush is such an amazing and dynamic figure that he would have become America's first black President. "w" wouldn't be the child of the head of the CIA or the RNC either.
Lets go back a couple of generations to see how his life may have played out. Prescott (little "w"s grandad)was the head of a major international bank. Prescott was born in 1895 which means he would have been the son of freed slaves or at most a generation removed and probably would not have been elevated to one of the top posts for Brown Brothers Harriman.
This would have changed everything of course because it is doubtful that Prescott would have been a Senator from Connecticut. Lets give them the ultimate benefit of the doubt and say that the family would have been extremely succesful black business people. This means that they would have been part of the "Great Migration" where millions of black Americans fled the South's Apartheid and moved to the north. Lets say the Bush clan (heh, heh) ends up in New York, Harlem to be exact.
The Bushs have, through their history, had ethical lapses in each generation so even if they had legitimate businesses it would not be hard for Prescott to be in charge of some of the more nefarious things going on in Harlem, like numbers rackets and drug dealing. Shit they did that stuff anyway so why not if they had just fled lynchings?
George HW Bush joined the military when he was 18, lets assume he would have done the same thing. He now claims to have been the youngest pilot in the Navy. Sorry, not until 1948 did the Navy see fit to give pilots wings to a black man.
Rather than end up at Yale as a legacy enrollment, George HW would have probably ended up at an all Black university, perhaps DCs own Howard University, paid for by the GI Bill.
Howard was a liberal college greatly influenced by W.E.B. Dubois and this would have to have had an effect on the young Bush scion.
What options would have been open to him? The law may have been attractive since we can assume by family history that the ministry would have been out of the question. Given his ability to kiss ass it is likely that he would have been able to pledge to Alpha Phi Alpha, the oldest intercollegiate Black Greek-letter fraternity. He would have no doubt been influenced by Howard Law schools most noted graduate, Thurgood Marshall. Perhaps he would have followed him into working for the NAACP.
Would his dream have been to work with Marshall on cases like Brown v Board of Education? Or would he have gone back home to Harlem to persue a carreer in politics? He couldn't have gone to congress since Adam Clayton Powell was in the midst of a lifetime term.
Perhaps he was destined to move to Houston and run for office there? I would like to see someone make an argument that he could have bested Barbara Jordan in anything that wasn't a sporting event.
So there we have a mid level attorney (blacks were not law partners in the 50s and 60s) or civil rights attorney living in Houston either working for or resenting Barbara Jordan.
Then he has these kids. He would have sent them all to college where George W. Bush would have been eligible for the draft. Would his father's connections to Barbara Jordan be able to keep him out of Vietnam? Maybe, but he would have at least had to serve in the Gaurd and in a segregated South to boot.
It looks to me that, leaving aside the glib comments about what would have happened to a young black man in Houston who was found with cocaine, but looking at what options would have been open to him that if Geroge W. Bush had been born black then he would most likeely be a middle or upper middle class black Texan who would end up on CNN talking about voter fraud in Florida and Ohio.
But then Im giving him the benefit of the doubt.