Light and darkness, extreme cold and extreme heat, communism and capitalism ' these are all things that cannot coexist. Notice that race is not a part of this list.
I have two friends. One has a white father and a black mother. People are constantly describing her as black. My other friend has a white mother and a black father. People are constantly describing her as white. Whenever these women are described incorrectly, I immediately reply, She is half-black
half-white. More often than not, I have been met with either a look of shock or a careless shrug coupled with same thing. Same thing? How is that the same thing? How is dismissing half of someone's entire life as an attempt to put them in a category the same thing as describing them correctly? It is not the same thing. These girls are equally white and equally black at the exact same time.
I think it is the popularity of Barack Obama that has prompted me to rethink the generalizations in America. Regardless of the fact that he was born in Hawaii to a white mother and a Kenyan father, because of the pigmentation of his skin, he has been immediately classified as black. Why? Why can't he be bicultural, biracial or both white and Kenyan? Why is Obama's late mother completely dismissed because her son has brown skin? Why do biracial people everywhere have to diminish a part of themselves because of the way they happen to look?
I cannot imagine the discomfort of the bicultural student whose unsuspecting friends make a stereotypical comment about part of her heritage. When she objects, her friends reply, Not you. You don't even look (insert ethnicity). Gee, thanks. Just because a person doesn't look like something doesn't mean the comment isn't extremely offensive to him or her. Even worse are people who deny part of someone's heritage because of how he or she looks, sometimes saying, If you have a black parent you're black.
Where did we get this idea that one-drop of non-white blood makes a person non-white? White people aren't pure water, forever tainted with a speck of dust. The actual colors white, black, brown, etc., are the colors of crayons, not people. People themselves come in all types of different shades and colors. That's why it is so confusing to me as to why people have allowed these silly generalizations to go on for so long by citing, That's how he or she looks. And the black people that embrace this one-drop rule as truth ' well, they are in dire need of a history lesson. So, in the spirit of Black History Month, let's revisit some black history.
In 1892, Louisiana state law described anyone who had one-eighth a drop of African-American blood as an African-American. This permitted Louisiana to deny certain people property, land and basic human rights. Remember Plessy vs. Ferguson? Homer Plessy had a great-grandparent who was black. This was used against Plessy to deny him the right to sit in the whites-only section of a train. His parents were white, his grandparents were white and all but one of his great-grandparents were white. But that one drop made him completely and totally black ' and made the court decision completely and totally ridiculous.
Now, black people claim the one-drop rule doesn't have an extremely negative origin. Saying someone is completely and totally black was a way for white people in the 19th and early 20th century to perpetuate white supremacy and superiority. Having black in you was not a source of pride, but a source of shame. Even more shameful and plain rude is the fact that we continue to disregard an entire half of a person's heritage even in 2008. Clearly, the 19th and early 20th centuries were periods of pure ignorance, so why are we still using their stupid logic?
Schools and companies sometimes refuse to acknowledge a person's full heritage in order to boost their diversity quota. The U.S. Senate is almost completely white except for Barack Obama and a handful of Asian-American and Hispanic-American senators. But it looks good to say that Obama is black and that we have one black person in the senate or that there is a black man running for president. I say we have a half-black person in the senate and a half-black person running for president. Some might think that is getting too technical. I think it is accurate.
Even Ohio University, with all of its diversity initiatives, forces students to pick one when filling out the demographic on the college application. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, Hawaiian Pacific-Islander G? oh, or other. Other? What does that mean, anyway? So if my mother is Hispanic and my father is white, I need to just pick one or mark the other demographic? Ouch.
This is identity theft on a grand scale that America has embraced as a general rule. Dismissing an entire half of a person's heritage in the name of convenience and quotas is not only rude, but grossly incorrect. It's not that I mind people calling my friend white or Barack Obama black (it's about time a black male was celebrated on a national level for being more than just an entertainer or sports player), but I don't think it is anyone's prerogative to determine someone else's race, even if the classification is not meant to be insulting. And black or white is just an example. People of all nationalities are sometimes forced to identify with just one part of their heritage. In a culture obsessed with classifications, I think that we should refrain from generalizations. I think we should allow all people to be themselves G? their entire selves, embracing all their heritages at the exact same time and not being subject to rude, lazy, self-seeking simplifications. But maybe it's just me.
Alissa Griffith is a junior journalism major. Send her an e-mail at ag180505@ohiou.edu.
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Alissa Griffith
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