The Presidential Race

I got to thinking during this election that no matter who won, I just had to play with exactly what “Black” and “African-American” meant (just two of the "words"- different folks have different preferences for how they’re “labeled” ), why we construct categories of bi-racial status for different groupings and racial mixtures depending on the races in question.

For example if a French or American Caucasian marries a Chinese, the resultant child is “Eurasian.” A few generations of intermarriage with "more" Asian or Caucasian, and the children down the line may be labeled under either Asian or Caucasian, but the “Eurasian” epithet will disappear.

When you got down to Native American/Indian mixes, it was and is considered an insult to call a White-Native American mix a “Half-breed,” a term that was widely used to describe people of mixed Native American (especially North American) and white European parentage. Mestizo is mostly used specifically of those people of the particular racial mixture of European and American Indian who inhabit and comprise much of the population of Latin America. Nasty being part Indian… until being one-eighth Native American got you into a college or university, qualified you as a “minority” on a job application or even got you a check from the local casino. Amazing how many “people of Native American heritage” appeared.

It seems that once a racial type is deemed negative, until you “pass” into another race, a little bit of color goes a long way. Rules were carefully devised to deal with the “property rights” inherent in American slavery. Any child of a slave was automatically a slave too. Words like “quadroon” (1/4 Black) and “octoroon” (1/8 Black) were common words in the early American lexicon, and rights and privileges were often determined based on such racial mixes. Both categories were considered "Negro," by the way. You’d think once slavery was gone, things would get a lot better. Only for those who had in fact been slaves at the time. Okay, we’ve moved on a bit from “Negro” or “colored,” but maybe not much.

Even as modern “enlightened” “young” people might not notice or have the opposite take, dark skin has very often been discriminated against. In the Subcontinent (South Asia, where you find India, etc.), darker skinned people tend to populate the lower parts of the Caste system, and they were (and often still are) denied opportunities – some were treated as “unclean” with folks washing and “cleaning” away the “contagion” as the “dark” folks left the room. Even Africans can treat each other differently based on skin color.

Not a whole lot dissimilar from the Jim Crow laws that supported the racial segregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines in the U.S. after the American Civil War (1861–1865) – a conflict that brought about the end to slavery. Even in World War II, military units were fully segregated. The famous school desegregation case, Brown vs. Board of Education, marked a turning point in American "sep arate but equal" policies that had, until this 1954 Supreme Court decision, been the rule in the land. Voting and civil rights laws followed, but other than having “lunch in the White House,” the closest that a Black man or woman got to the Presidency was as a visitor or an employee of the government.

So what about a modern day Black person in the United States ? Here’s Wikipedia: “[G]enetic research published in 2002 established that African Americans were a diverse ‘multiracial’ group in the broadest sense. Nearly all African Americans were descended from both sub-saharan Africans and Europeans… According to newer and more advanced genetic research, African Americans fall primarily into the first group with 80% of the population being ‘mostly African.’ Twenty percent has more than 25% European ancestry, reflecting long history of both groups in the U.S. The ‘mostly African’ group is substantially African, as 70% of African Americans in this group have less than 15% European ancestry. Since almost all have some detectable amount of European ancestry, the ‘mostly African’ group is multiracial in the broad sense. African Americans in the ‘mostly mixed’ group are almost entirely between 25% and 50% European. These findings confirm that African Americans are indeed a multiracial, ethno-racial community.”

A lot of people, not just American racists, are a tad uncomfortable about a man of clear African heritage becoming the next President of the United States. For example, Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlesconi, at press conference in Moscow the other day, said this about the new President-Elect: "I told the [Russian] president that [Obama] has everything needed in order to reach deals with him: he's young, handsome and even tanned." Wow.

So is Tiger Woods an Asian-African? Thai, maybe (they think so in Thailand )? Is Barack Obama a Eur-African or just “you’re Black”? And in a country where “minorities” are becoming a majority, does the word “minority” actually matter in our Democracy?! Isn’t it time to stop thinking about and labeling darker-skinned minorities as if we were still a nation of pre-Civil War slave owners?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I’m just puzzled.