During slavery blacks made the distinction between “field Negro and house Negro." It's the same thing, with a different name. If you are unconvinced of this wisdom of the crowd then look at unemployment figures: blacks versus whites; the whiteness and foreign-born-ness of Silicon Valley and Hollywood; the wealth of black households versus white, with almost exponential differences.
Let’s look now at what Hollywood and Halle Berry have to add to the conversation. The actress will grace the March issue of Essence magazine. And in her interview she speaks for herself but not for Hollywood when she says her daughter is black. Even though this year’s Academy Awards will be the whitest in 10 years, directors have been known to cast “black” actors who look white as white. This is not the same colorblind casting that calls for an individual male or female person, does not specify race, and then someone with stature such as Denzel Washington or Will Smith is cast. That sort of casting seems to happen only to those who are big box office draws in the first place.
Halle recently said her daughter was black because her mother is black, with no mention of a white father. She does not stand alone in her assessment but I don’t think she could fill a stadium with that argument either. Opinions online point out that Nahla is 75% white, and therefore what? That’s where the logic ends. My guess is that they arrived at this figure by adding 25% white genes from Berry and 50% white genes from Gabriel Aubry; therefore she becomes 75% white, but not white based on "one drop." That makes no sense to me. The reality is closer to Nahla as 85-95% white genotype. (That number takes into account the fact that blacks' genotypes often include Native American and Western European.) In any other country she would be classified as white. But here she is simply black. Confused?
It is confusing and for a good reason. The one-drop rule that Berry invoked allows for an over-simplified conclusion. She was wrong and I hope she reconsiders, or next time has a baby with a black man. I would advise anyone from Tiger Woods to Halle Berry to Alicia Keys to Mariah Carey and others whose offspring look white (or have a white parent) to put white on their child's birth certificate.
That may be a hard choice and a complicated one. Some cases are simple, as when a biracial (Barack Obama) or multiracial person marries a black person and their offspring look identifiably black. But that is not what nieces in my family did and that is not what Halle Berry did—they had offspring with white men, hence their children look identifiably white, not biracial or mixed. Case closed.
Article comments
1 - Joanne Huspek
Interesting article. I also don't see the point of the "one-drop" rule. It only works for those who are black, but not for anyone else. Why should that be? Because I am 1/8 American Indian, by that standard I should be considered American Indian. But according to the tribe, both I and my father are not considered so. And in my father's case, who was born in the 1930s, my grandmother put "white" on the birth certificate for the obvious reasons that she didn't want him to be discriminated against since she was half Ojibwe.
I do not consider our President to be Black, nor Tiger Woods, or anyone who is of mixed ethnic heritage. Why isn't Obama just as white as he is Black? Why isn't Tiger just as Asian as he is Black?
In my mixed up pedigree (including white, Asian and native American)- where do you put me? I participate in many survey web sites and the first thing they ask after age is what race you consider yourself to be. I am annoyed when I cannot check more than one box.
And what is really difficult to comprehend is that when a person is of mixed racial background, their life experiences are like no other, no matter what box you try to put them into, this from personal experience.
Thank you for your article. It was worth the read.
2 - Heloise
It is called hypo descent. And it should also apply to native Americans. It don't bcz money is involved. And we all got some Indian in us my friend but we all don't have African blood. Least ways we can trace. Not talking about the motherland as cradle here. Hypodescent means the raciest mix that is the least powerful politically or in the eyes of the world. Blacks would be the least or last. Only if your race but only if that race is non white does the rule apply.
Joanne you are white end of story. One good friend from a while back had long blond braid down her back and a cute square nose her mom was half Cherokee and they did not want to be white. But they and you are white. Her dad was Anglo too. That should be races above.
It is quite clear I think.
3 - Jean
My goodness, tri-racial people in the South have been dealing with this issue for generations, and we considered it no big deal, we knew the majority of the country was not enlightened, and we didn't care. We knew of our tri-racial mixture, so we talked among ourselves of our own family traditions- where it mattered the most. On my mother's side her maternal grandmother was the daughter of an African slave man and a Choctaw "cook" - full blood from the Anderson Plantation in Mississippi. Her grandmother, married a German logger in Mississippi. So on my mom's side, she is African, Choctaw and German. Her father, was African, Cherokee and Chinese (many Chinese men took African American wives down in Mississippi - see the book "Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton") So my mom passes on African, Choctaw, German, Cherokee and Chinese DNA. On my father's side we bring in African/Cherokee/Irish on his father's side and African/Cree on his mother's side. So in effect our family diverges on many racial lines. We're proud of it, and we pass it on.
4 - Chicano
Joanne Huspek You dont consider Barack Obama to be black?
Studies published by the peer review Journal pnas found white people are the product of admixture or mixing between Africans and East Asains, therefore white people are the product of mixed and mixed haveing mixed. So im guessing as white people owe there existence to mixing your gonna now demand all white people stop calling themselves white, and u no longer view whites as white due to the fact white people came from mixing between two non white people?
Some how i dont think you will stop viewing people as white, despite the fact white people only exist because East Asians and Africans began haveing mixed race children and we now call them white.
5 - Heloise
I agree that is how mexicans have become classified, not just labelled as white.
6 - Keith Beckles
Hilarious that Halle Berry thinks her daughter is black. I don't even consider Halle to be black far less her kid. I have two mixed race kids, they consider themselves brown and leave it at that, but we live in Canada and are pretty much over the racial hair splitting. My parents from the caribbean considered my first wife (french irish) to be white but not my second wife (100% italian canadian). Point being, eventually we will mostly be people of indeterminate ethnicity and everyone can relax.