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.