I have been confused as to why in America people like Barak Obama, Alicia Keys, Halle Berry, and Meghan Markle are considered black. It seems the racist one-drop rule is still in effect. I was raised by Cubans in a Cuban community and to Cubans, a person who is mixed with black and white do not just disregard their whiteness. Obama, Keys, and Berry were all raised by their single white mothers, yet they and the country consider them black. Just the other day, I was watching Django Unchained (Great Movie) and I noticed the Christoph Waltz character inform Leonardo Dicaprio that Alexandre Dumas (author of the Three Musketeers) was black. The fact is that Dumas had one grandmother that was black. He certainly was proud of his black ancestry, but he also considered himself French. But Quentin Tarantino seems to go by the racist one-drop rule and considers Dumas to have been black.
I just think it's ironic that the so-called "Anti-Racists" are continuing this Jim Crow tradition.
First, the "one drop rule" even as a court legality has only passed out of effect since the 1980s. Remember that it's only been since 1967--when I was a teenager--that interracial marriage has even been legal throughout the US. The vast majority of light-skinned black people were a matter of light-skinned blacks marrying light-skinned blacks. There were very few interracial marriages because the social consequences were so profoundly negative. "Biracial" has only been a thing in the US since the 1990s.
Up until the 1970s, white people who "married black" effectively lost their "white cards." They lost their jobs, they lost their families, they even may have lost their homes. They lost their "white privileges"...being treated the same as black people, if not worse, by racist whites. That didn't turn around until the 1980s.
What that means is that bi-racial people in the US who are about 45 or older will tend to identify as "black" because that's how they were treated as children and how they were raised, it's how their white mothers taught them to survive.
What's happening now, though, is actually worse than the one-drop rule. Before, we had black and white. Recognizing bi-racials as an entirely separate category has not reduced racial tension, it's actually multiplied it. Like South Africa, we now have a "Colored" class. White people still don't accept them as white, but now black people don't accept them as black either. And for the first time, white people are actually treating them as though they were a group separate from blacks.
My daughter happens to be light skinned (a matter of how our genetic dice rolled...my DNA reveals that I'm 20% Scottish and my wife is 40% English, although you can't tell that by looking at us). Although my daughter's facial features and hair are distinctly Afroid, her skin is as light as, say, Halle Berry's skin.
She was a teenager in Nebraska and then central Illinois when that "biracial" breakout was beginning in the 90s, and suffered from being too dark for the whites and too light for the blacks (although she had been in Hawaii--like Obama--in her elementary school years, where her skin tone and facial features had fit right in).
She has recently discovered that in today's the workplace, she's unknowingly "enjoyed" bi-racial privilege. She discovered that when the CEO invited her into his office for a chat and began talking about his own biracial grandchildren. She realized, "Wait...he thinks
I'm biracial. Is
that how I got this job?"
As I said, it's only been since 1967 (when I was a teenager) that interracial marriage has even been legal in all the states. Don't expect the consequences of that to be erased while Boomers are still alive. It may even take the demise of the Millennial generation.
