Who Are We?
—Many people still stick to a one-race label, even if they are of mixed descent, researchers say, sometimes because of strong identification with one racial group, and occasionally because of a conscious effort not to dilute the numbers of the group they most identify with.
In interviews, people of mixed race said their decision about how to identify themselves was deeply personal, not political; it is influenced by how and where they were reared, how others perceive them, what they look like and how they themselves come to embrace their identity.
—“When you’re multiracial, you can be several things at the same time,” said Ms. Van Kerckhove, 30, who is white and Asian and has endorsed Mr. Obama on her blog for moving the race debate away from “who’s black and who’s white, or who’s a victim and who’s an oppressor.”Unfortunately, Ms. Van Kerckhove added, suspicions persist about the motivation of people who identify themselves as mixed race. Many people, she said, wonder, “Are multiracial people trying to be multiracial as a way to escape racism?”
yep talking about lost souls
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what is rarely noted in such discussions is the uniquely North American origin of the so-called "one drop rule". there was no such rule in the Caribbean or Brazil because slaves in those places were relatively cheap, owing to the wind-powered shipping technology of the day that made Brazil the easiest New World landfall from Africa, the Caribbean the next easiest, and North America the longest, most difficult and expensive trip, done in part against the prevailing winds. So while Brazilian and Caribbean slavemasters could simply work their slaves to death every few years and buy new ones, North America slavemasters had to maintain their much more expensive per-head slave populations. Slave children were a valuable commodity in North America, but a nuisance in Brazil.
The privileged access to black women on the part of white slavemasters produced regular crops of brown babies, who themselves were too valuable to be set free. So North American white slavemasters passed one-drop rules into law everywhere in order to be able to see their own children by black mothers as slaves. That's where it came from.
It did NOT arise, as some "multiracial" spokespeople would have us believe, from "black leaders" desirous of inflating the numbers of people they represent. The one drop rule came from white power and white privilege, that's it and that's all.
Now that some segments of the ruling elite find the one drop rule no longer politically or economically expedient, they are boosting "multiracialism" as the wave of the future. Every day I bother to listen, I can hear the "one drop rule" blamed on those clannish black folks, who we hear all the time are "the real racists". That's why they live in those all black neighborhoods and towns so often.
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Nice points, Bruce. Yes, the one-drop rule was created by white supremacists to keep an enslaved population of Blacks enslaved for generations regardless of how white they looked because of racial ad mixture. But since slavery no longer exists, should the one-drop rule? I don't see the problem with a first generation biracial person identifying as biracial/multiracial. But I understand that identities are fluid. For myself, I have a complicated way of identifying. I call this blog "AskThisBlackWoman", studied Black Studies in college, work for a major Black organization, one could safely assume I identify as Black. I don't. I identify as biracial, with a heaving leaning and interest in Black culture, which I call my own. Culturally I'm Black, but my genes are multiracial. I don't think that one identifying as biracial/multiracial necessarily assumes that they are ashamed of being Black or that they somehow participate in white supremacy (consciously). And of course, by biracial, I'm talking only about those of use with one white parent and one Black parent. There are plenty of mixtures out there!
I don't think racial identities should be about numbers, exoduses, allegiances, not anymore.
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I do not question your individual motives, or your rights to them.
But just as the one drop rule was promulgated by the white authorities of one day for their benefit, could it not be that the new "multiracial" thing is in our current day being pushed by white authorities for their own reasons, which need have nothing to do with yours, or for that matter mine?
In other words, do you concede that it might be possible for some important sectors of the nation's current ruling elite to want to blur racial statistics in order to make it more difficult to document persistent racial inequity?
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This query will never be answered unless we say human beings
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