Skip to main content

The One-Drop Rule

Some of my best friends are white.  
Most whites are not my best friends.  


Here is how you can tell who is white:  you ask.
If they say something like, "I'm mostly English, I think,
but my mother was part Irish, and my Dad was European."
Or, like me, you can say, "All Norwegian".  
(Well, my Grandfather admitted that once there was
a German in the family, but that was a long time ago.)


White!  Maybe a mongrel, but white!
I guess you can be partly white, and partly Cherokee,
or partly white and partly Chinese, or partly Chinese
and partly Thai.  Most of us are partly.


Barack Obama isn't partly.  He is black.
His mother was white--mostly English, I think,
but part Scotch and Irish and German:  you know.  White.
Obama's father was African, so Barack Obama is black.


The One-Drop Rule applies.  Under Jim Crow laws
(beginning in 1910) all it takes is one drop of black blood,
and--Wahoo!--you are black.  Not half-black:  black!
Any African ancestry, at all, makes you black!


It gets a little complicated if you go back too far, 
because then we are all black, because the entire human race
originated in Africa, and wandered around until we decided
that some of us blacks were asians, and some of us were
europeans, and some were Mayans.  Human drift, I guess.
But we still are one species, with minor variations.


Except for Barack Obama:  he is black.  
So is everyone else with so much as one drop . . . 
well, I guess that doesn't make sense, but it is true.


And you thought Jim Crow laws had gone away, didn't you?
C'mon, man!  Tell the truth!  I will bet you have said that
Obama was black, haven't you?  All it takes is a drop:
one ancestor, somewhere back when.  


Stupid stuff.  Everyday racism.  





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there