Racial Identity
By
John C Abercrombie
When the subject of race comes up, everybody believes they are Experts on the subject and are 100% able to determine the race of a person by looks alone. Such is not always the case as you will discover from the videos that accompany this post.
- We often pride ourselves on being colorblind, but that term often means that we don’t talk about the subject and not that it makes no difference. Many people say they were raised without prejudice and really mean that race was not one of the topics discussed.
I thought the same, until one day I was speaking of an Oriental person and someone asked which race? I was dumbfounded. The conversation in my mind was “What you talking about Willis?” “Ain’t they all the same?” The person asked if the person was Chinese or Japanese or Korean.
Because of lack of exposure, I had no idea, but after being exposed to the subject found that there was indeed a difference.
As we explore the subject in detail, one of the most serious incidences of misidentification comes from eye witnesses identifying a person of a different race. Many people have been sentenced to years of imprisonment or even death because of misidentification.
Often such physical features as skin color or hair texture or even hair color, eye color are used incorrectly to label people. It is frequent that skin color alone is the determining factor. While in college, there was an attempt to integrate a segregated movie theater. The person standing in line and being refused a ticket must have smiled, knowing that her sister had been admitted because of this misidentification.
I never attempted to use the main branch of the public library because Blacks were denied, yet the principal of my elementary school was permitted. He was fair, had light colored eyes and kept his hair very short. No one was harmed by his presence; thus, race is all in the mind.
Homer Plessy, of Plessy v Ferguson had no appearance of any Black heritage, yet, under law, he would have been classified as Black in some states. Some states because of variances in the law. In some states a person of ¼ Black blood were classified as White, while in others, 1/16 was all it took to be classified as Black.
The Virginia Racial Purity law of 1924 recognized only 2 races, one being White. Native People were in danger of loosing their identity because they were grouped in with Colored or Black. Showing the absurdity of the law, there was a Pocahontas exception. That allowed White people with percentages that would have classified them as Black to be excepted from the racial identification.
As we speak of Indians, it is a gross misnomer. Native Americans are called “Indians” because a White guy thought he was in the country of India. Not only was he mistaken, he was also wrong in his racial identification of Native Americans.
We have also identified Walter Francis White, the grandson of 9th president of the United States and had the appearance of a White person, fair complexion, blue eyes and blonde hair, yet never identified as White.
Many of us, especially older people know of people who have moved away and taken on the identity of a White person. Many people are extremely upset by DNA tests that show some African heritage. Yet, some of the people that we identify as White have African heritage.
An interesting post would feature some of the people that we “believe” are White who have African heritage.
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