What Obama Isn't: Black Like Me

New York Daily News ^ | Stanly Crouch

[AppyPappy]

She's Caucasian??? Man, she looks white to me.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

She's Caucasian??? Man, she looks white to me.

Hmmm....my spectacles must need a cleaning then.

[Question_Assumptions]

The nice thing about Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was that it showed problems on both sides. It wasn't a simplistic oppressor/victim tale.

[Question_Assumptions]

A woman called up an NYC radio station. Her mother was white and her father was black and, apparently, she looked very white. She said she's been harassed by black women for trying to steal black men when she dates black men, even though her own father was black.

I like the way Vin Diesel handles the issue. He treats his race like a non-issue, as far as I've seen.

[showme_the_Glory]

black like Cliton?

[2harddrive]

Help stop Osama Obama! We don't need another Hussein.

[RightWhale]

I couldn't even guess. He can certainly speak for himself, so I would let him speak for himself.

[lqclamar]

The one drop rule has always been the social custom in this country

For most of the segregation era it was actually a little more complicated than "one drop." The "one drop" rule did not come into significant use until the 1920's, and even then many states stuck with older percentage classifications based on the Spanish-Portuguese colonial system. The legal bars in those systems were usually either 1/16th or 1/8th. As racist as they were, they allowed greater variation than the less common "one drop" rule - i.e. a 1/4th black person had more rights than 1/2 etc. The categories were given names to designate each as well, which sometimes also included Indian ancestry.

1/2 black was a mulatto
1/4 black was a quadroon
1/8 black was an octoroon

and during Jim Crow someone who was half black would have been subject to the same restrictions as those who were 100% black. Homer Plessy, of Plessy v. Ferguson, the case which allowed for Jim Crow, was only 1/8th black.

Not as often as you think. The partially black Creole population of Louisiana had more legal rights than pure blacks even though all faced some types of discrimination. It was also often the case that they couldn't tell a person with 1/8th black ancestry without specifically knowing his ancestors. Homer Plessy is an example of this. His arrest was actually arranged as part of a test case by a civil rights group hoping to challenge segregation before the Supreme Court. It produced the wrong outcome unfortunately, but the case was financed by a committee for the explicit purpose of testing the law in court. They recruited Plessy because, contrary to popular belief, he was virtually indistinguishable from a 100% white person. He was even registered to vote in Louisiana.

During the infamous train incident Plessy purchased a ticket for the car labelled "whites only" for the explicit purpose of challenging the law in court. Plessy boarded without any notice and the conductor took his ticket without question. He then stood up and informed the conductor that he was 1/8th black and was sitting there intentionally to break the segregation law. The conductor got a security officer on board the train and Plessy was arrested. In a way he was a Rosa Parks figure 60 years before, but unlike Parks he was arrested only after he told them he was 1/8th black.