Teresa Wiltz writes:

For most of its history, America decreed that anyone with any African ancestry was Black — and rumors of purported Blackness could derail a career, a marriage, a life. Now, the irony is that some feel comfortable accusing those same people of making up their Blackness altogether — or not being “fully Black” if they come from multiple racial backgrounds.

But the problem with trying to decide who qualifies as Black and who doesn’t is that there are many, many ways to be Black in America, thanks largely to slavery.

I’m Black and I have two Black-identifying parents who also had two Black-identifying parents. You have to go back generations to find the white folks in our family tree, but their existence is there, evident in the texture of our hair, the hue of our skin, the slant of our noses. (And in our 23andMe genetic testing results.) We are the result of centuries of miscegenation, generations of Black biracial people marrying other Black biracial people (and the occasional Native American) again and again and again, descendants of both the enslaved and the enslavers, born perhaps of love, but most certainly, from rape. In the U.S. — but not so much in other countries — that potent gumbo of DNA makes us (happily) Black.

Harris, with her sleek blowout and cafe-au-lait skin, would fit right in at our family reunion. After all, on her Jamaican side, she comes from a very similar genetic soup, also a product of that island’s legacy of slavery. To be Black in the Americas is to be racially mixed, dating back to the earliest Colonial days, when enslaved Africans lived with, worked with, rebelled with and had babies with indentured Europeans and Native Americans.

The longer you’ve been in this country, no matter your racial identity, the more likely you are to be mixed race. [Continue reading…]