When is Black “Black?”
After decades of the “one drop rule,” where blackness was based on the slightest amount of African heritage, it seemed odd to argue over a woman who openly embraces both sides of her family and talks candidly about being raised black, but also being biracial. It seemed odd to determine that this was some form of betrayal if she used the term multi-ethnic in reference to herself when she is, in fact, multi-ethnic.
Presidential candidate Barack Obama describes himself as a black man of mixed heritage and no one questions it, but Soledad O’Brien does it and it’s somehow contradictory. I have come to believe this is only because she looks white enough to pass and is married to a white man. These signifiers are used to strip her of her right to call herself a person of color. They are a way to reject her for having the gall to be born not looking black in an age where half-black people who don’t look black often choose to declare themselves otherwise.
The whole debate over O’Brien (and the misdirected, but true frustration over a black mother with white looking children who saw them, and felt the world saw them, as black) made me wonder if the rules had changed for some people. Was black really black anymore? In St. Louis we have a city license collector who looks as white as any white man, but possesses a southern drawl and a demeanor that is everything of a black man. Is that O’Brien’s crime? She doesn’t ooze blackness? Because I’m black, visibly black, and I don’t “ooze” blackness. But my race is not questioned because of that high visibility.
Is the problem that O’Brien isn’t seen as a “real” black woman? That she couldn’t have had endured a “real” black woman struggle because she is so light? Is this another variation of the “spectrum” warfare, the colorism that happens amongst black people? In a form of pre-rejection, where some blacks withholding their embrace of O’Brien because some lighter blacks rejected the darker in the past and present? To even the field a reversal must take place?
And if your mother is “black” as O’Brien considers herself, what are her children, who are blond haired and blue-eyed? Where does this fit when historically all it took was one Afro-Cuban grandmother to make you black? Does the rule no longer apply? Are their different rules for those who can “pass” and who can’t? And is that rule based on how black you look, if you can pass and if you are perceived as benefiting from your “whiteness?”
And how much of this is about ego — hers and ours? When a black person who could pass choses “us” I tend to look favorably on them. But is their endorsement an old lie based on outdated and outmoded beliefs? Can you be something other than black in America when you no longer look black in America?
I had a Great Great Aunt Josephine, and she, like many members of my father’s mother’s family were light enough to pass for white. Yet my great great aunt and her sisters and her nieces were vehement about their blackness. They would curse you out in an instant if you doubted who and what they were. They married the blackest men they could find. As did my father’s mother, explaining why the light-bright-and-almost-white lineage ended with him and his brothers.
Yet at the same time, when it benefited them, they didn’t exactly correct white people. My father is fond of telling a story where his Aunt Dinky, the only dark one out of his mother’s sisters, drove my father and his brothers to Kansas to see their great-grandmother who was in the hospital and dying. Aunt Dinky told the taxi driver what house to take her to and the cabbie said no colored people lived in that neighborhood, but she insisted he take her anyway. Then when she told him what hospital to take her to, he said no colored people went to that hospital, she still insisted that was the right place to go.
Once inside the woman at the front desk repeated the same tired song. There were no colored people at this hospital, but Aunt Dinky looked down the hall and there was Aunt Josephine and her sisters. She told the attendant she saw her family and kept going. When Aunt Dinky told her aunts that they had the folks in the hospital thinking they were white, Aunt Josephine shot her down. Why would they think that, she said while her mother lied sick in a bed, whiter than any white woman.
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