I am wondering why people who are born from white and black parents still called black. Sometimes even when they are only 1/3 or 1/4 black they are still called black.
In: Biology
For the same reason that light blue is still called blue, even if the colour is so light as to be closer to white than it is to blue.
It would perhaps be more accurate to say brown and some people do say brown, but the colour brown has some bad associations, so most people avoid that word for fear of causing offence.
So something very interesting that I heard from a friend in Gabon: They call mixed kids “blanc or blanche”, which is white in french
So I think its just cultural differences. In Europe/US we’re all white and so even if someone is mixed to us they’re still “black”
But to africans (in Gabon) mixed kids are white
For the purposes of expanding the restricted class, the [One drop rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule) was established.
The idea is to make as much rightless people as possible to expand pool of slaves.
People that are born from black african parents and white european parents are called mulattos.
There was a rule called one-drop rule (anyone black in the ancestry makes you black) in many US states.
Other states had laws like 1/16, 1/8,1/4 black ancestry as the threshold of claiming to be white.
Historical laws create racial terms African -american, Asian-American, Native American etc while European-americans are not called so
But these kinds of ideas can be found in many countries around the world.
A white shirt is only a white shirt if it is white.
Every other colored shirt is considered colored or dark.
Because of latent racism, and attendant conception of “race” from that.
Historically, a lot of person apply the “one drop” rule for determination of race, IE if you had any non-White ancestry, you were black. Thus, culturally, half castes were still considered “black”, and suffered under the same prejudice, and that attitude is still prevalent today.
This is specific to the USA where the children coming from the rape of a female slave by the master were slaves themselves and therefore black in the racial structure, this meant they could be sold and support the slave society even after the triangular trade stopped. You have to consider that until the civil rights movement fought against the Jim Crow laws (American version of apartheid) blackness was less about skin colour and more about culture.
For comparison in the Spanish colonies a person with a white and a black parent would be called mulato and would have a different status in society from a person of full african heritage.
In the US this partly goes back to all the bullshit we went through to quantify whether someone was subject to Jim Crow laws. In the early 20th century this was codified by many states as the [One Drop Rule](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule) – one drop of black blood/one black ancestor meant that according to the law you were black. There was a lot of fear that white-passing black people could somehow access rights and privileges that they weren’t entitled to due to in reality being black.
The entire concept is ignorant because a decent chunk of the population is not ethnically “pure” – folks who identify as European American may have African or Latino DNA, folks who identify as African American may have European or Latino DNA, etc.
On the flip side, I have fellow white folks who are in relationships with Black partners and, for the most part, their kids identify as Black because they are perceived as black by our culture and suffer the same prejudices as their parent of color. For the most part we in the US don’t read people as “biracial”, we make judgments about whether they’re black or white. So while they’ll disclose that they’re biracial if asked, mostly they experience life as a person of color.
One of my friends expressed to me the gut-wrenching reality of being a white man having to bring his child to their black family to have “the talk” about how to interact with US law enforcement. He has two young black men and one young black woman as children, and it brings home the reality of being a person of color in the US home in a while different way.
Only the US really does this. Most other nations have explicit distinctions between black and partially black (or native and partially native such as in much of south America), which may or may not be further broken down.
In the US it stems from old laws on slavery and later racist laws that mainly used “pure white” as the dividing line. Most other nations either had pressure to recognize the mixed children of wealthy white men, or decided to make multiple classes of people instead of only one dividing line.
It’s often a shock for black Americans traveling to say a Caribbean country to find they aren’t considered ‘black’ there.
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