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legitimately a white guy as he is a black guy? The reason we accept him as black and feel confused about the suggestion that he is white dates all the way back to slavery and the "one drop rule".

Here is Wikipedia's explanation of what that rule means to us:

"The one-drop rule is an historical colloquial term in the United States that holds that a person with any trace of African ancestry (however small or invisible) cannot be considered white... and so, unless the person has an alternative non-white ancestry that he or she can claim, such as Native American, Asian, Arab, Australian aboriginal, the person must be considered black."

This rule dates back to Jim Crow, and was an attempt to discourage racial mixing:

"The 191019 decade was the nadir of the Jim Crow era by most measures. Tennessee adopted a one-drop statute in 1910. It was followed by Louisiana the same year, Texas and Arkansas in 1911, Mississippi in 1917, North Carolina in 1923, Virginia in 1924, Alabama and Georgia in 1927, and Oklahoma in 1931. During this same period, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Utah retained their old "blood fraction" statutes de jure, but amended these fractions (one-sixteenth, one-thirtysecond) to be equivalent to one-drop de facto.[4] By 1925, almost every state had a one-drop law on the books, or something equivalent. These laws gave justification to bureaucrats like Walter Plecker of Virginia,[5] Naomi Drake of Louisiana,[6] and similar people around the country, who insisted on labeling families of mixed ancestry as Black." [Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O ne_drop_rule]

When the kinds of comments that created the furor over Ferraro and Wright start to make no sense to us, we'll know we have actually gotten past slavery and its toxic legacy. Until then, we can help America move forward by acknowledging the problem and giving people room to have feelings about it.

To all the white people who are right now experiencing hurt feelings, I say, grow up.

Learn more about this author, Pamela Grundy.
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