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
We’re delving into a very complicated history of racism and racial perceptions but the short answer would be: throughout the imperial era and beyond, Europeans saw themselves as being superior to all other races. So they tended to see people as either white or not-white. The definition of who counted as a white person changed throughout history. But a half black person was first and foremost seen as non-white in a binary sense.
When these things were first thought up people thought (and many still think today) that having dark skin was inferior and that a child of mixed parents was somehow “tainted” and thus not white.
In some places complicated social hierarchies were invented about how white or how black people were with terms like mulato, Quadroon and octoroon, depending on how much black and white ancestry you had.
In some places in Europe, what you were called was mostly a function of the actual color of your skin rather than percentage of ancestry.
In the US there was at some point the one drop rule, that basically said that if you had any ancestry no matter how remote or small you were legally black.
In practice it often ended up that if you could pass for white you could get away with pretending to be white as long as nobody knew better.
Modern genetic tests and generations of mixed race people passing and mixing in with the white population mean that if you tried to apply the old one drop rule in the US today much of the population who think of themselves as white would count as black. (If you go back 22 to 28 millennia everyone has only black ancestors because that is how old the mutation for lighter skin is.)
Race is a cultural and political concept. What you describe is how one society views race. I assume you’re speaking of the United States society. The US is heavily influenced by the “one drop” rule, in which having one probably Black ancestor made you Black. It is a system made to separate Blacks from whites and was heavily enforced during segregation.
That’s not how every society views race. In Brazil, society tends to see race as a matter of each individual. A person’s family is not very relevant for reading that person race. A white person can have a black parent and that doesn’t make them black. The idea is that people in Brazil are judged more by their appearance then by their ancestors, so that’s a better description of how race works in that society.
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