How I Learned about the One-Drop Rule: Mark

TRANSCRIPT:

 

FANSHEN: Recently I asked my friends when was the first time that they heard about the one-drop rule. And their answers were really incredible, so we’re sharing them here and we’d like to hear yours. So send us an email (onedropoflove(at)gmail, tweet us, anything, and let us know: when was the first time that YOU learned about the one-drop rule?

MARK: I self-identify as mixed, but I am politically Black. In our family we never talked about race or the one-drop rule – anything. And so basically I just intuited that there was a one-drop rule because I was defined as Black growing up as far as my experiences.

My dearest friend, growing up, would call me “contraband” because he learned about the phrase – he read something about slavery and that a slave that was seeking freedom, if they were caught they were considered ‘contraband’ and he thought that was funny. I had no knowledge, so he was calling me contraband and it hurt like hell and I had no ability to defend myself or to articulate a different argument.

So it really wasn’t until I graduated from high school, I was in the Marine Corps, I came across an interesting story in the New York Times about a woman who was suing the State of Louisiana because her birth certificate said that she was ‘Colored.’ She was raised White, she self-identified as White. And she fought her case all the way up to the Supreme Court and lost because according to state law, in 1970 if you were just any – any trace of Black, you were Colored to 1/32 Black, you were Colored. And she had 3/32s – they even went so far as to hire a genealogist. And so that fascinated me – it really resonated with me. I couldn’t articulate why, but I just found it a fascinating story.

Ten years later I was attending school at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland and I learned about the one-drop rule. And that’s where I learned about slavery, I learned about Manifest Destiny, etc. etc. etc. And I learned about the one-drop rule and I learned how pernicious and ridiculous it is and how hard we work to create a caste system and what really saddened me was defining Black as a negative – that if you had any part Black in you, that was not a good thing. And that’s…that’s heartbreaking. Nobody should ever have that experience and it will end because of people like Fanshen, who are creating this space for us to talk about elements of racism such as the one-drop rule and I’m very appreciative and have much gratitude for allowing me to share my story of how I learned about the one-drop rule.

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From

http://www.onedropoflove.org/how-i-learned-about-the-one-drop-rule-mark/

 

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Department of Interior, Indian Affairs, Hiring a Genealogist

The NGS website announced this week an opening at the Department of Interior, Indian Affairs, for a genealogist in the Washington DC vicinity.  Let’s hope that whoever they hire also understands, and I mean really understands, DNA testing – as they assuredly will be bombarded with questions about how DNA testing pertains to Native people and their descendants.

 

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Sourced through Scoop.it from: nativeheritageproject.com

Failing White Kids

By Jennifer Harvey

 

Excerpts by Glenn Robinson

 

In the mid-1990s Mary Bucholtz spent hours in conversation with students at a racially diverse high school in northern California. During her interviews, she asked each student a seemingly straightforward question. She asked them “for the record” to identify themselves according to their age, sex/gender, grade and race/ethnicity.

One of her persistent experiences blew my mind.

Almost every white student could not or would not answer Bucholtz’s question in a straightforward way. On everything else they did fine. But when it came to race/ethnicity, their responses ranged from the ironic (exemplified by a student who said, “I’m the whiteness of the white boys” in a fake British accent; responses Buchold characterizes as mock-celebrations of “affiliation with whiteness”), to those “feigning ignorance” (respondents qualifying “I’m white” with phrases like “I guess,” or “I don’t know” or odd elaborations like “From, uh, outward signs”).

…

how problematic “white” is in a racially supremacist society

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if one names one’s white identity without demonstrating a reluctance about that identity one risks being perceived as somehow endorsing racism

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white racial identity and white supremacy are so bound up with each other in the U.S. that these young people get silly, snarky or tongue-tied because–forced to own “white”–they are trying desperately to create a gap between these two things.

 

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Sourced through Scoop.it from: livingformations.com

Is It Better To Be Mixed Race? [VIDEO]

Aarathi Prasad sets out to challenge the science of racial purity and examines provocative claims that there are in fact biological advantages to being mixed race.

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The Invention of Hispanics – Latino USA

Before 1970, the US Census Bureau classified Mexican, Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants as whites. Each community of Latin American origin would go by their nationality and by the region where they lived in the United States. But all that changed in the seventies, as activists began lobbying the US Census Bureau to create a broad, national category that included all these communities. The result was the creation of the term “Hispanic”, first introduced in the US Census in 1970.

 

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Source: latinousa.org

Finding Your American Indian Tribe Using DNA

Native Heritage Project

If I had a dollar for every time I get asked a flavor of this question, I’d be on a cruise someplace warm instead of writing this in the still-blustery cold winter weather of the northlands!

So, I’m going to write the recipe of how to do this.  The process is basically the same whether you’re utilizing Y or mitochondrial DNA, but the details differ just a bit.

So, to answer the first question.  Can you find your Indian tribe utilizing DNA?  Yes, it can sometimes be done – but not for everyone, not all the time and not even for most people.  And it takes work on your part.  Furthermore, you may wind up disproving the Indian heritage in a particular line, not proving it.  If you’re still in, keep reading.

I want you to think of this as a scavenger hunt.  No one is going to give you the prize.  You…

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Probability of Eye Color

Probability of eye color

 

Black People Created White People

By Abagond

Mitochondrial Helena (c. 18,000 BC) lived in south-western France at the height of the Ice Age. As the ice started melting about 15,000 years ago, her descendants moved north into empty land. They now account for 47% of all Europeans.
In terms of mitochondrial DNA, she is the common ancestor of haplogroup H, one of the main branches of Mitochondrial Eve’s family tree. Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes gave her the name Helena (H for Helena) in his book “The Seven Daughters of Eve” (2001).

Among her descendants are Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Nicholas Copernicus, Saint Luke, Susan Sarandon and maybe half the White people in the world – along with a good number of North Africans and South West Asians as well.

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Source: abagond.wordpress.com

Haplogroup A4 Unpeeled – European, Jewish, Asian and Native American

 

“Mitochondrial DNA provides us with a unique periscope back in time to view our most distant ancestors, and the path that they took through time and place to become us, here, today.  Because mitochondrial DNA is passed from generation to generation through an all-female line, un-admixed with the DNA from the father, the mitochondrial DNA we carry today is essentially the same as that carried by our ancestors hundreds or even thousands of years ago, with the exception of an occasional mutation.”

 

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Source: dna-explained.com

DNA ancestry tests and Black Americans

Note: I already did a post on DNA ancestry tests. This one looks at them as applied to Blacks in the US. Unlike other Americans, Blacks had their ethnic identity and history taken from them. Even N…

Source: abagond.wordpress.com