Actually MBM, Colin Powell got into trouble once by saying, "I'm not that black!!!" A geneologist concluded that Colin Powell was a distint relative of Princess Diana........He considers himself "African American" because of political correctness.
Here's an interesting article from Interracial Voice:
Does "Black" mean the same thing as Multiracial?
By George Winkel
Often "black"-identified posters to Interracial Voice disparage interracial marriage; and they vilify our racially mixed progeny who proudly identify as "mixed," biracial, or multiracial. Ironically, the most virulent of critics more often than not are of multiracial heritage, themselves. The caustic observations I have set out below synthesize a post by a typical such racial "admixture"-denying "One Dropper":
1- Black means multiracial. New identifiers, like "bi-racial" and "multi-racial," are just silly. And worse, they are divisive -- and disloyal -- being a step toward passing for white. (Which act is moral betrayal!)
2- I identify "black," and I refuse to identify myself with terms such as "bi-racial," or "multi-racial."
3- What is "monoracial"? Isn't this non-word intended to belittle the "fully" black people not privileged to have a white mom (or dad?), and thus be "bi-racial"? (Closer to white?)
4- Should you succeed in gaining recognition as a new "in between race," won't your "closer to white" social place in the U.S.A.'s top-down race pecking order come at the expense of your own black family -- the "monracial" ones? You seek white favoritism by standing on the heads of black people -- the folks at the bottom (as always).
5- You need to know it is impossible to have a black parent and not be black! (Impossible, that is, without the shocking disloyalty of joining the whites -- by committing the guilt-ridden, dangerous act of passing for white.) Whites will never allow your "bi-racial" child to be anything but black! Don't you know about their "one-drop-of black blood makes you black" edict? Whites proud of their pure white ancestry always put us down by their One-Drop Rule.
6- It has always been so. One drop of African "black" in your family tree and you are African American! Black people can be any color. Look at Gregory Howard Williams, for one. He appears to be a very white white man -- living proof that we African Americans are the rainbow race.
7- Moreover, your flaunting your "mixture" resurrects the ugly mythical "biology" of race. Race is only a social construct. There are no biological races to "mix." How can you "mix" what is an abstraction? Your "multiracial" identifiers only resurrect this monstrous "race biology" as your "new race." Also you create divisiveness in our oppressed racial minority -- a community needing to unite collectively and resist the institutional white racism always directed against us.
8- "Bi-racial," "multi-racial," amounts to nothing but running from your blackness. And it is disloyal, too!
9- You're black! Get over it!
It is important to know that these criticisms -- familiar ones to self-identified multiracial peoples -- are full of fallacies, misrepresentations.
As the hypothetical dropper poster above says, "black" certainly is multiracial. Historically, "blood" from all of the "races" became "mixed" in with the abused "black" population. It is said that approximately a fifth of African American genetic heritage is "white" -- that much of it entered during the two centuries that "white" men owned slaves who were female (and of African descent).
But regardless of its being genetically multiracial, when did "Black" ever attack the "race" notion, pointing to how accepting "mixing" contradicts the myth that separate "races" even exist?
Does "Black" represent multiracial? No! Did "Black" ever stand for anything but "a black monorace"? Never! For that matter, when did vocal "back" adherence typical of the above to the so-called "one-drop of black blood rule" (the defunct Jim Crow laws against "passing" for "white"), not actively try to prevent anyone "black" from being anything more than "black monorace" -- just as we so often see being pushed this way here?
The central theme in the whole "one drop black" message above is the nationalistic whisper, "us against them." The poster concludes arguing the need to unite collectively against historically oppressive, ubiquitous "white" racism, characterized as "institutional." However, truly institutional racism has not existed since the 1960's. The last Jim Crow laws were abolished then. Racism appears indirectly now -- as various statistical social inequalities -- the new meaning of "institutional racism"? Whatever causes the persistent inequality, it needs "races," apparently, so as to statistically match them up for multicultural-style comparison searching for "racial inequalities." Would human inequalities be undetectable without knowing everyone's "race"?
I think an element of "black" nationalism drives "minority" "race" identity politics now, which is relatively new historically. I have seen the evidence of this new "black" nationalism in the Black Power/Panther movement, which arose in the mid-1960's, and flourished in the 1970's. I have seen more evidence in the newer "re-Africanization" movement, which inspired the new moniker, "African American." It replaced the newly dignified "Black" (circa 1960). So it was, in the 1970's-1980's that many "blacks" rejected their "slave names." They took African names. And many rejected Christianity, the religion of their American ancestors, and adopted Islam. Invention of the artificial Kwanzaa celebrations, and other cultural novelties came out of this movement for "re-Africanization," too.
There was something more going on behind the last three decades of rejecting our shared "white," European cultural heritage -- I'm convinced -- than merely the exuberance of "black" Americans' celebrating their new civil rights, since the 1960's.
The decennial census is in Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. The census plays a central role in our democratic government. The census "enumerates" Americans into voting districts for the various states. State governments use the same census data creating their own, smaller, more numerous political subdivisions, too. In Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339 (1960), the U.S. Supreme court forbade "white" politicians to continue as they had long done, deliberately "gerrymandering" "white" voting district lines so as to fragment "black" communities -- effectively preventing "black" voters together electing "black" congressmen. I believe this upholding of the Constituion's Fifteenth Amendment was squarely in line with the civil rights movement. Gomillion, together with the 1965 voting rights act, changed "black" (a name with derogatory connotation before 1960) into a political community with growing power.
This was because the Gomillion v. Lightfoot Court, and others following it did not forbid "blacks" and "minorities" from using the "race" data in the census in a "gerrymandering" sort of way, consolidating their communities into "majority minority" voting districts. In fact, for 33 years the Court encouraged "majority minority" districting, with a "65-percent rule," expressly aimed at concentrating "minorities" into political districts of "their kind." Clearly, the U.S. Supreme Court -- all branches of Government, in fact -- went on the assumption that "race" was an immutable, actual division of human biology. Today the prevailing notion of American egalitarianism still recognizes the "different races" need fair political representation, sensitive to "their" unique racial identity and needs.
If pets and farm animals developed language, and agitated for political self-determination, too, it is hard to see how the model for their "empowerment" would differ one whit from our present U.S.A. devotion to "minority" political representation and multicultural "empowerment." In short, "race" is being treated as "species." "Race" is only an abstraction, purporting to be the non-existent "subspecies" of mankind. In fact, "race" has no actual, natural meaning. None whatsoever. "Race" purports to segment our natural human racial somatic variation arbitrarily. The fact our somatic variation is racial in nature does not mean that we subdivide into any "subspecies" or "races."
All human beings are the same species Homo sapiens. There is no rational basis whatsoever for subdividing us into any number of "subspecies" or "races." There is no socially redeeming purpose whatsoever for designating any "race" but one -- the Human Race. Impressing arbitrary, abstract "race-lines" for "race" categories upon the human genetic biome's seamless continuum has no purpose but falsely implying "species differences."
Species are different life forms by definition. And being mutually exclusive, species are different from one another (by definition), such that they cannot be "equal." "Race" (which invokes "subspecies") applied to human beings, only sets up the popular confusion with "species." Species by definition cannot be equal. The mere existence of "race"-consciousness imposes a top-down social caste hierarchy on our society, which by no accident is quite analogous to the inequality of animal species. A review of the history of "race" in America (recent history, at that), shows that the confusion of the Negro supposed "black race" with lower animal species is absolutely not any historical coincidence.
In 1787 the United States Constitution was written, emphasizing that there shall be no "bill of attainder" (i.e., legislated punishment of blood-kindred family or named group), and no inequality of social rank by inherited class, as "titles of nobility." (U.S. Const., Art I, § 9, cl. 3, Art III, § 3, cl. 2.) (Sadly, the same Constitution authorized interstate pursuit of runaway slaves, and it counted the "black" slaves as only 3/5 human.) (Id., at Art. I, § 2, cl. 3) The formal naming of "race" along with Blumenbach's five sub-specific "races" came out in his book published in 1775. "Race" seemed to be new "science" when the Constitution was written, as when the 19th century began.
The 19th century was filled with misconception by the public, leading figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and many influential doctors -- and even by scientists of the time -- believing that Negroes were a different (lower) animal species from "white" European Caucasians. In 1865 ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ordered the total abolition of slavery in all its forms. Supreme Court decisions soon ruled that the sweeping Thirteenth Amendment also bans all the "badges of slavery or servitude," too. Antebellum slavery depended for its definition of who was slave on there being some sub-Saharan African, Negro ancestry ("drop of blood"). This linkage clearly makes "race" itself a "badge of slavery." Moreover, the linkage modernly applied defining "races" by ancestral "blood" makes any right or entitlement contingent on "race" inevitably impact reproductive liberty. Ancestral "race" either impacts one's own rights directly, or through impacting the rights of one's children, derivatively impairs the freedom to marry established by the Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) U.S. Supreme Court decision. Until "race" is absolutely, totally removed from Government's ken the Constitution's guarantees that there shall be no "bill of attainder," no inherited titles of nobility (or "ignobleity"), and no more "badges" of slavery or servitude, will continue being mere hollow promises.
As to census enumerating, finally, in Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630 (1993), the Supreme Court decided "race" could no longer be "the predominant factor" in drawing electoral districts. However, the Court continues still to allow "race" to be a significant districting factor. This is not enough to derail or slow the vigorous engine of "black" and "minority" political "empowerment" which has been accelerating for more than 30 years on the high octane fuel of "race." "Majority-minority" style "empowerment" of the so-called racial "minorities" in the country has encouraged "race"-conscious politics. Election of powerful people to high political office based more or less on their "race" or their constituents' "race," instead of their election and holding of the office based exclusively on shared humanity and citizenship, has created Frankenstein political monstrosities possessed of balkanizing will to live and grow. In furtherance of this, the Office of Management and Budget, enumerating the latest census, insists on counting each "race" as being "mutually exclusive and exhaustive." Clearly, the census -- delegating future political power in the Nation -- still treats Americans' "races" as if they identify "different" animal species. (Species are not "equal." "Species" means "different," and it does not, cannot mean "equal.")
I believe this spreading influence for "us against them" racial separatism is what underlies "One Droppers'" seeming fanatical allegiance to "their black race." The same inspires their hatred of the multiracial identifiers, which not only signify people pulling away from lock-step with the "black" political collective. The multiracial identifiers threaten the fragile "race" illusion itself, that being all that "race" is.
"Race" is an abstract, and frankly defamatory false notion. It falsely alleges non-existent mutual exclusivity (i.e., conjuring up illusory social "species"). The vast majority of "white" people don't understand this, however. They feel intuitively that they can "see" the "races."
"All but a few persons take it completely for granted that scientists have established the 'facts' about 'race' and that they have long ago recognized and classified the 'races' of mankind. Scientists do little to discourage this view, and indeed many of them are quite as deluded as most laymen are .... It is not difficult to see, therefore, why most of us continue to believe that 'race' really corresponds to something which exists."
(Ashley Montagu, Mankind's Most Dangerous Myth, 1942.)
"Now note, Dr. Ashey Montagu did not say that physical differences do not exist, because obviously they do. We can all see them. What he did say is that 'race' is a classification of human beings, and that it is imposed by theorizers of one sort or another as a way of looking at these differences. 'Race' does not exist as anything except an ideal classification of empirical biological differences. Race is, in short, not part of the data, but it is [merely] a way of looking at the data."
(Paul Bohannan, Social Anthropology, 1963, p. 186, quoting Montagu, above; original italics, my bold & brackets.)
Probably most "blacks" and "One Droppers" comprehend that they are not any sort of biologically "separate subspecies" from the "white" Americans. But such is "race" politics today that "blacks" embrace the notion of their own "minority race." "Black" activists, instead of challenging the bogus and intrinsically defamatory "race" notion, will campaign to keep "race" and government "race" surveillance, in order to monitor racism and administer various "race"-based laws. They defend "race," and they defend their abandoning the 1960's era civil rights agenda of integration. They explain that "race," while not "biological," nonetheless is a social reality of our times. They claim that "race's" social reality now is built on "white privilege," racism, the historical victimization of "minorities," and on statistically demonstrable social inequalities. In short, "race" identifies, for them, not biological but sociological divisions, which are in the nature of ethnicities. "Equality" of these proxy "ethnicities" is what they say they strive for, and they deem deconstructing "race" premature so long as evidence of prejudice or inequality remains.
"Race" is so evil that society needs "race" to be deconstructed, whether or not anything else is repaired. Even if getting rid of "race" will not cure all ills, isn't it a start? It can be done. Why wait?
At "black" or organized "minority" insistence the U.S. census still counts "races" as being "mutually exclusive and exhaustive." This can only make sense implying that "race" means something like biological "species," which, by definition, are unable viably to cross-breed. Species are essentially mutually exclusive. It is false, defamatory pseudo-science for "race" to imply "species" -- or imply that people should not marry interracially because their children will be somehow unable to synthesize two "races." "Race" and its new proxy for "ethnicity," remains bogus science. And calling it "sociological division" only transplants the bogus science in bad sociology.
If "race" is sociological division, as "black" activists will argue, then when was "race" not the same mere social tribalism -- the same ethnic complexion chauvinism they foster now? Southern segregationists, such as Orval E. Faubus and George Wallace made clear their belief that immutable "differences" define "race" biologically. But their belief could not create biological truth. Never were there any "biological divisions," regardless of any white supremacist's belief. The Marxist-influenced "black" nationalist multiculturalism promoted today as "ethnicity" is proxy for the same "races." At the end of the day this is the same ethnic complexion chauvinism as the KKK Grand Dragon's supposed "biological" "races."
"Race" has no place in government or law. However "race" arose from bad government and law. "Race" is a socially constructed abstraction which cannot be defined scientifically. Science today must share accomplice liability for the consequences of recklessly encouraging public belief that "race" was scientifically meaningful.
Certainly, "white" people invented "race," and "one-drop," too, as part of their unconscionable shoving their notion of their claimed "white supremacy" down everyone else's throat, so to speak. "White" people, with their Jim Crow intolerance forced "black" people to accept "one-drop," and forget their multiracial heritage -- just accept being "black." That is history.
But why did "whites" create and impose the post-bellum "one-drop rule" if it was not their attempt to save the illusion of mutually exclusive "races" by denying "mixing"? (Aren't "Droppers" in the same denial now?)
The hypothetical poster's argument relies ultimately on "white" prejudice, or racism. The poster invokes the "one drop rule" as the mechanism and the proof of "white" racism.
Such an advocate of "black" would point out to me, no doubt, that not all racial prejudice ended with the civil rights triumphs of the 1960's. Multiculturalism's intelligencia produces tons of statistics and studies showing "black" income and lifestyle still lags behind "white"? People with advanced degrees earn livings teaching and researching, showing that all of the human evils, bias, and racial prejudice remain in evidence.
Nonetheless, it is clear that the claimed culpability of "white" prejudice is too broad. Prejudice, xenophobia, bias, favoritism, meanness -- all the things that could be loosely characterized as racism -- I am sure these are inseparably part of Mankind's being. These weaknesses and sins we have always had. They are part of us -- part of our species, going back to our Hominid evolution, maybe millions of years ago.
I argue that the civil rights establishment Left is wrong to put off deconstructing "race" until all these normal, intrinsic human weaknesses are "sensitivity"-trained out of all school children, and out of all the adults. It will never happen. (This is a ruse, frankly, for keeping Affirmative Action and all the civil rights "equalizing" administration forever. This ruse is for the eternal career security of Leftism; and endless growth of Leftist "minority" civil rights lawyers, University professors of "diversity," and "diverse" "anti-white" "caucuses" of growing "minority" political alignment.)
One Drop "black" activists argue that the movement for "black empowerment" needs all its troop-strength. It is far too early, I'm told, to let "black" people break ranks, choose their own "race" -- or worse, yet -- embrace a multiracial identity, one denying that there are any "races."
But in fact, isn't all the "black race"-mobilization aimed at fighting "white" institutional racism which vanished entirely more than 34 years ago? Prejudice today absolutely lacks the legal importance it had prior to 1964 (Civil Rights Act). So what if some social prejudice can be found? Can "white" attitudes nowadays really check anyone's career ambition? At most, "white" racism, prejudice, even "profiling" now is an annoyance. Without the legal force it once had more than 34 years ago how can mere social prejudice block anyone's earnest goals? African American deficiencies since the 1960's must trace to some other explanation -- might it possibly be a legacy of clinging to their "monoracial" "black race"?
And exactly what "white" solidarity do "blacks" confront now in the wake of the 1960's? It is important to understand the purpose of the former Jim Crow segregation laws. The "anti-miscegenation" laws were the central part of Jim Crow. That whole ugly system was meant to try and save the "white race" from gradual "amalgamation." Racial myths, which once were laws, proclaimed white supremacy based on the supposed "purity" of "white" people's "blood." The "one-drop rule" first defined "white" as meaning racially "pure." (Loving, supra, fn. 4 on p. 5.) Jim Crow segregation was an effort to hold back the historical tide -- "white" authorities enacting Jim Crow legislation knew that "amalgamation" results inevitably from mere continued interracial contacts. What did "white" Americans say of their own racial definition by alleged "purity," then, when the "white" Congress overturned all Jim Crow segregation laws in 1964-1965? What did "whites" say of their own racial "pure blood" existence, then, when the "white" Supreme Court overturned the "one-drop" rule, and all the "anti-miscegenation" laws in 1967? By these moves, American "whites" started deconstructing their own "race" (and derivatively all of "race"). Hasn't "white" meant "multiracial" too, the same as "black," now the past more than 34 years?
What do the terms, "multiracial or biracial" mean now if they don't state the obvious fact -- that "black" and "white" don't exist as "races" anymore?
George Winkel
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Biography: I practice appellate defense law in the California Fourth Appellate District, the State Supreme Court, and occasionally before the U.S. Ninth Circuit.