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White civil rights leader has pretended to be black for years

Yossarian said:
The legacy of the "one-drop rule" - laws to prevent interrracial marriage that maintained anybody with one drop of African blood should be considered Black - runs very deep in the US.
news.harvard.edu

‘One-drop rule’ persists — Harvard Gazette

Harvard psychologists have found that the centuries-old “one-drop rule” assigning minority status to mixed-race individuals appears to live on in our modern-day perception and categorization of people like Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, and Halle Berry.
news.harvard.edu news.harvard.edu
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Do US passports actually have a person's ethnic origin on them? That is even more disturbing tbh. My passport contains my name, my birthdate and my sex as well as an (unflattering) picture and a serial number. The only thing it actually needs is the last two since I am sure I was not the only person born on that date and I'm certainly not the only human male on the planet. Human nature being what it is having names on them is probably a given but a quick google of my own name reveals lots of usually more famous people that share it.
An even more revealing statement that strikes very close to home for me is this one which reeks of the racist attitude of the people being asked the question
The researchers found, for example, that one-quarter-Asian individuals are consistently considered more white than one-quarter-black individuals, despite the fact that African Americans and European Americans share a substantial degree of genetic heritage.
My own children are quarter Asian (Mrs Q's mum is from the Philippines) and their Asian genes are definitely dominant over the Anglo-Saxon ones. On my son's first day at Uni someone complimented him on speaking great English for a Korean.
 
Exactly. I know a bit about one great grandfather and met my great Gran, she was alive lived to 107. I think my cousin has done a bit of family tree research. There is some tenuous link to George Washington way back but other than that couldn’t say much. The idea of applying for a passport and anyone beyond your grandparents having any bearing on it does seem bizarre.
 
xenon said:
how do people even know this stuff? I can’t be the only one who doesn’t know with my great great great et cetera is
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In the Louisiana case, the state decided to spend thousands of dollars tracking down the woman's roots, and many thousands more on a trial, after she applied for a passport and was apparently outraged to find out that her birth certificate said she was Black. Insane that this happened less than 40 years ago.

But his job was to fight Phipps' claim, and the state spent $5,100 to track down her roots. During a trial last year, a genealogist traced her ancestors back 223 years to the black mistress of a Mobile plantation owner in 1760. Taking into consideration more recent ancestors who had some "black" blood, the genealogist calculated that Phipps was 3/32 black. That's enough to make Phipps black under Louisiana law, which considers a person to be black if he is 1/32 black--for example, if one great-great-great-grandparent had two all-black parents of African ancestry.
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light for the info. it’s almost goes without saying but it is completely bonkers. Racism in the US isn’t of course new and startling information to me. But the idea of the authorities went to that effort to dig back into someone’s history to categorise them, that is particularly insane.
 
Regarding the new case: how did she get away with it for so long? She obviously doesn't look like she has any recent African ancestry at all. Does confirm the notion that one of academia's functions is to contain verbally persuasive cranks and prevent them messing up more important work.
 
Doodler said:
Regarding the new case: how did she get away with it for so long? She obviously doesn't look like she has any recent African ancestry at all. Does confirm the notion that one of academia's functions is to contain verbally persuasive cranks and prevent them messing up more important work.
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Obviously? Is Ryan Giggs 'obviously' not mixed race? How about his (full) brother. One's ancestry is very often far from 'obvious'. The sad thing about these cases is that they drag us right back to the one drop rule era with the same rotten ideas such as 'passing'.
 
Doodler said:
Yes, obviously a chancer as well. Surely you wouldn't have been taken in by her?
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Talking about this stuff it's really hard not to fall into the rotten, false assumptions of the jim crow one drop era, or the apartheid SA era, or the German Nazi era, or the 19th century 'scientific racism' era. But falling somewhat into that hole, a person with, say, one black african grandparent and three white European grandparents may be perceived in their phenotype as expressing 'African' features quite strongly, a little, or not at all.

Hence my comment about the rotten concept of 'passing'.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
I know a tiny bit about a couple of the great grandparents (couldn't name any of them mind you) and absolutely nothing before that. Never had the urge to find out. Who cares?
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It's interesting isn't it? Gives you a look into bits of history that you won't necessarily have found out about otherwise. I think it's both fascinating and poetic that multiple generations of my family have strong links to the part of south Manchester my partner lives in, for example, and that one branch of the family were irish tailors who moved there for work in the industrial revolution. Or that the family of shipbuilders on another branch of the family lived and worked for years in St Petersburg, where there was a large immigrant population of Scottish shipbuilders at the turn of the 20th Century. Why wouldn't you care?
 
NoXion said:
What possible insight is there to be gained from your aimless, passive-aggressive post? OK, so you think there are people on this forum who don't measure up to whatever you define a socialist to be. Is this supposed to be new knowledge somehow?
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Not worth engaging.
 
campanula said:
Sometimes, the past is just another weapon. I am deeply interested in the history of labour relations, population movements and diasporas, kinship and family...but emphatically not my own...where I prefer to keep my eyes looking firmly ahead. Sleeping dogs and all that...
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well sure, but that's a whole lot different from 'who cares?' isn't it.
 
killer b said:
It's interesting isn't it? Gives you a look into bits of history that you won't necessarily have found out about otherwise. I think it's both fascinating and poetic that multiple generations of my family have strong links to the part of south Manchester my partner lives in, for example, and that one branch of the family were irish tailors who moved there for work in the industrial revolution. Or that the family of shipbuilders on another branch of the family lived and worked for years in St Petersburg, where there was a large immigrant population of Scottish shipbuilders at the turn of the 20th Century. Why wouldn't you care?
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Cos it's nothing to do with me. I guess either you feel that way or you don't. I pretty much follow the idea that either you know/knew someone or someone you know knows/knew them. Beyond that lie stories and legends and myths, but nothing directly known or knowable to you. Nothing that is particularly specific or formative to you.

I would guess this also correlates with how you feel about your family more broadly.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Cos it's nothing to do with me. I guess either you feel that way or you don't. I pretty much follow the idea that either you know/knew someone or someone you know knows/knew them. Beyond that lie stories and legends and myths, but nothing directly known or knowable to you. Nothing that is particularly specific or formative to you.

I would guess this also correlates with how you feel about your family more broadly.
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I get you about the legends and myths. My family's history is pretty murky with a lot of gaps. Some things I was told as a kid definitely weren't true, and I still have to tolerate their re-telling from time to time. These stories suit purposes that aren't those of a recorded history.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Cos it's nothing to do with me. I guess either you feel that way or you don't. I pretty much follow the idea that either you know/knew someone or someone you know knows/knew them. Beyond that lie stories and legends and myths, but nothing directly known or knowable to you. Nothing that is particularly specific or formative to you.
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Does it having nothing to do with you make it not interesting? History is interesting. Being able to zoom in on one small part of it is interesting.

I agree we can't (in most cases) know much beyond their names and jobs and locations and their movements from place to place, but that information can help illuminate the moment they lived in, sometimes very vividly. That's what's worthwhile, not whether they're tenuously related to George Washington or something.
 
killer b said:
Does it having nothing to do with you make it not interesting? History is interesting. Being able to zoom in on one small part of it is interesting.

I agree we can't (in most cases) know much beyond their names and jobs and locations and their movements from place to place, but that information can help illuminate the moment they lived in, sometimes very vividly. That's what's worthwhile, not whether they're tenuously related to George Washington or something.
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But in that sense anyone's history is interesting (and I agree about the illumination of everyday people's history as opposed to the way things are often taught with respect to 'great figures', kings and queens and the like). People get very specifically interested in their ancestry in terms of their direct lineage, though. There's a psychological need involved that not everyone has (or not everyone channels in this way).

It seems like people are often looking to find out something about themselves.
 
My sis traced some of the family history which was interesting to learn about father's side coming from small hamlet near Aberdeen. I've never been that interested though, I wonder how much is to do with having kids and passing the information on. I've never wanted kids so that side of it doesn't appeal.
 
killer b said:
Does it having nothing to do with you make it not interesting? History is interesting. Being able to zoom in on one small part of it is interesting.

I agree we can't (in most cases) know much beyond their names and jobs and locations and their movements from place to place, but that information can help illuminate the moment they lived in, sometimes very vividly. That's what's worthwhile, not whether they're tenuously related to George Washington or something.
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I know many other people don't feel like this but you have just to accept that I do. Stories from history are interesting yes. But such stories are of no greater interest to me just because they happen to involve one or more of my ancestors.
 
I wonder if the disinterest that littlebabyjesus feels is less common amongst people whose antecedents have been done over by the bigger shittier moments of history like forced displacement slavery etc. I've met people who were really keen to find out which bit of Africa their great grandparents might have been stolen from for instance, what their real names were etc, for whom that would have been meaningful to know. I have some of that too, don't know even the most basic stuff like what country they were born in for anyone before my grandparents (who were the only ones out of their families to survive hitler). I'd really like to know but have sort of given up with nothing to go on, names all got garbled by overworked immigration officials last century etc.
 
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