Re: comments/suggestions..?

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, BurningYou says...
>
>in america if you have the smallest amount of 'black'
>in you you are considered black.. no matter how many times
>you claim you are not 'fully' black, you are black in this society.
>

Yes, thats the irrational "one drop rule"...one drop of black blood 
and you are black.  First used by slavemasters to increase the number
of slaves, now used by blacks and mixed race persons whenever it suits their
interests;

Heres some more written on the subject of the one drop rule:


So why is Tiger Woods still seen as an African American?

Yes, his father Earl greeted him too. But it’s funny how, when race is
mentioned, Earl Woods trumps Thai-born Tida, and Tiger suddenly isn’t the
mixed-race child of the universe. He’s African American. End of story.

As far as I can tell, it’s the perpetuation of that old “one drop” rule.

“One drop” refers to one drop of blood, an informal standard in the African
American community. It dates back to the day when people thought races had
different characteristics and traits based on having different blood. Anyone who
has taken high school biology can debunk that. Use of the “one drop” rule also
helped to expand the slave population in the antebellum South. Suddenly you too
could be a slave! And by Jim Crow time, of “separate but equal,” “one drop” was
an acceptable standard.

Shouldn’t we just drop any allegiance to such a standard?

But if not, where’s the “one drop” rule for APAs? (Asian Pacific American)

It appears that race is still too complicated for our culture, let alone the
mainstream media, which still insists in story after story that Woods is African
American.


That’s how race usually works in America. It’s called the "one drop" rule, a
peculiarly American paradox. It holds that if you have one drop of black blood
in your family, you’re black. You would have to go back to Nazi Germany’s
Nuremberg laws to find anything quite like the one drop rule, simplistic,
racist, and pernicious. In America, the one-drop rule goes back to plantation
days, and it’s been with us ever since. Homer Plessey, for example, looked white
but he was 1/8 black. That’s all it took in 1896 for the Supreme Court to decide
in Plessey V. Ferguson but he could not ride in a railroad car reserved for
whites as long as they were separate but equal facilities for blacks. The
one-drop rule was invented by slave masters because they wanted to have more
slaves. Today, ironically, the one-drop rule has been embraced by black folks
because we want more black folks. After all, greater numbers translate into
greater political and social clout. So it’s a big deal for racial and ethnic
groups when the federal government decides which races are to be measured, which
boxes are to be checked on the census form. The debate has never been more
fierce than it is right now. It’s even reached Capitol Hill. The number of
marriages between people of different races has quadrupled since the 1960's. It
keeps going up. It is not turning back.