Suggesting that there is something contrived about a mixed-race person identifying as Black assumes that the choice wasn’t already made for her.

With the abolition of slavery in 1865, white Americans were determined to maintain the architecture of white supremacy and the exclusive white rights it entailed, even as the pervasive rape and sexual coercion of enslaved Black women had produced large numbers of Black Americans with European ancestry. So as white Americans passed apartheid laws to keep millions of newly freed Black people from political, social and economic equality, they also had to pass laws to determine who would be considered white and could therefore enjoy the spoils of the constructed racial hierarchy.

  • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world
    17·
    4 months ago

    Last week, former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, told a room full of Black journalists that Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian and whose father is Jamaican, “was always of Indian heritage” and “now wants to be known as Black.” When he did so, he was embracing a convenient historical amnesia about the country he seeks to lead.

    She’s talking about national amnesia about the past.

    …These laws determined not only that people of African ancestry were inherently enslavable, but also that the children of European men and enslaved African women would also be enslaved. Their “whiteness” would not be recognized, and they would be entitled to none of the rights the white colonists were crafting for themselves.

    …The premise of the so-called “one-drop rule” is that any person who has even a drop of Black blood is Black. Under this law, despite Harris’s being of both Jamaican and Indian heritage, she would have legally been considered Black.