What makes a man black or white or whatever?
This post is a ways off my usual track, but I’m genuinely scratching my head here.
I was just reading in today’s paper that Barack Obama is now the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. Several times in the article, the author mentioned things like how far the country has come, now that Barack Obama is in line to become the first black US President.
Later, in the same article, I read that Mr. Obama’s father was a black man and his mom was a white woman. Then I started thinking.
In my reality, a child of one parent of race B and one parent of race W has a genetic makeup of BW, pretty much 50% B and 50% W. Now, if this BW child ends up being elected President, how can anyone in good conscience say this person is our “first B President?” I mean, wouldn’t the person be as much a W President as a B President?
What if Mr. Obama married a white woman and had a son with her? That son would have 4 grandparents, and their 4 races would be BWWW. Would Mr. Obama’s son then be a B man, simply because his father was labeled a B man because he had a B father?
I was born in 1944, when segregation and racial discrimination were still institutionalized. I witnessed the Civil Rights movement, or at least watched parts of it on the news.
I seem to remember reading that in the days of slavery a person was classified as a black person if they were 1/16 black or more. That means a person was legally classified as a Negro if just one of their great-great-grandparents was black.
But those days are gone … aren’t they? So why is our Democratic Presidential Candidate referred to as “black” when he has only one black parent? I can think of a few reasons, and I don’t especially like any of them.
Race and religion … people seem to be uneasy unless they can pop you into this or that pigeonhole and slap a label on it and then think of you as that label. Why is this not a good idea?
Peace, y’all.
~riverflows
River Flows 