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
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.
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