{"id":10814,"date":"2010-12-14T20:35:28","date_gmt":"2010-12-14T20:35:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=10814"},"modified":"2013-06-15T20:37:56","modified_gmt":"2013-06-15T20:37:56","slug":"why-biracial-means-black-the-history-of-race-in-america-means-most-blacks-are-biracial-to-some-degree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=10814","title":{"rendered":"Why Biracial Means Black: The History of Race in America Means Most Blacks Are Biracial to Some Degree"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Biracial Means Black: The History of Race in America Means Most Blacks Are Biracial to Some Degree<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Root
\n<\/a>2010-12-14<\/p>\n

Lauren Williams<\/strong>, Associate Editor<\/p>\n

Checking a census box that says “black” doesn’t mean you’re denying your white ancestry. It’s just how we roll in America.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Halle Berry<\/a> scored her milestone Oscar win in 2002, nobody was screaming from the mountaintops that the first biracial woman had won the Academy Award for best actress. It\u2019s not too often that you hear someone calling Barack Obama<\/a> the country\u2019s first biracial president. And although I know people who are biracial and multiracial who primarily refer to themselves as such, I\u2019ve also heard most of them refer to themselves as black.<\/p>\n

My own mother, who is Creole<\/a> and fair skinned\u2014to the point where some people assume she is white\u2014will tell you that she is black if you ask, although her answer could be a lot more complicated if she wanted it to be. But isn’t it the same for many black people in this country? It\u2019s generally safe to assume that most black Americans are multiracial. As The Root\u2019s<\/em> editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr.<\/a>, has pointed out, statistics demonstrate that 58.5 percent of black Americans have at least 12.5 percent European ancestry.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why a new study about how biracial Americans of black-and-white ancestry often self-identify as black<\/a> comes as no surprise. What is surprising is that the researchers refer to this decision as \u201cpassing for black.\u201d As if not mentioning your white ancestry when asked to identify yourself is somehow akin to light-skinned blacks of the past having to completely reject\u2014sometimes forever\u2014their heritage and families in order to blend in to white society.<\/p>\n

No, it\u2019s not the same, and for a lot of reasons: A biracial person can check \u201cblack\u201d on a census form and 10 seconds later start talking fondly and proudly about his or her white mother or father (anyone who\u2019s heard Obama talk about his family knows this). For biracial or multiracial people to call themselves black is not a wholesale denial of their past and family. It\u2019s not a lie. It\u2019s not, heaven forbid, a ploy to get minority-based benefits, as was suggested by researchers behind the study. It is, for better or worse, a by-product of living in a country that is only a few generations removed from Jim Crow<\/a> and the one-drop rule<\/a>…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Biracial Means Black: The History of Race in America Means Most Blacks Are Biracial to Some Degree The Root 2010-12-14 Lauren Williams, Associate Editor Checking a census box that says “black” doesn’t mean you’re denying your white ancestry. It’s just how we roll in America. When Halle Berry scored her milestone Oscar win in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,125,8,394,20],"tags":[3529,2935,4728,352,3045,3234],"class_list":["post-10814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-cathryn-johnson","tag-henry-louis-gates-jr","tag-lauren-williams","tag-nikki-khanna","tag-nikki-khanna-sherwin","tag-the-root"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}