Say whaat?

Now, we will have a President with a suntan that doesn't need to be renewed.

Fortunately, this is on record in Italy.

hehe

...is that we are, on balance, insane.

The racial categorization of Americans -- and people of the world by westerners -- has been one of the most poorly-explicated issues in the history of mankind. While each group commonly regarded as being "racial" or, more correctly, ethnic or cultural, in nature, is largely determined by self-identification, the official, legal record, as this book illustrates, is far more convoluted and crazy.

This is not to say that people who hate based on "otherness" don't function by means of "common sense", but that the legal definitions of who or what we are are even crazier, at times, than the people who love to hate based on differences.

This latter fact is especially unfortunate, since despite the perception of some narcissists among us, we are not all the same person or one Great Other. It is extremely timely and satisfying to have Barack Obama come along at this point in our unfolding, since he has been alternately considered "not black enough" and, of course, "too black" as well. "Too black", needless to say, generally means any perceptible trace of negroid facies or coloration, not to mention any manifestations of "natural" or environmentally conveyed "black" behaviors.

The "performing" as a member of a certain race can be picked out more easily where there is a pronounced majority of one sort of people. This I learned while living in Orange County, California, between 2000 and 2006. For my entire stay out there, I was acutely aware of the missing blackness, the lack of nominally black people. Since I am of "mutt" descent anyway, half Irish, the rest divided between American Indian, then (in no particular order) Scottish, German, English, French/Cajun, and Negro, and grew up in a southern milieu where black culture was dominant, I am "at home" with a certain amount of orientation and confirmation via the black people around me. When there weren't any I felt a little bit off balance. Then one day, while discussing a strategy for making the hospital's pre-op sceduling process more nearly perfect, someone suggested something in which I immediately detected a logical flaw, and blurted out "That ain't gonna work."

As Wm.S. Burroughs put it, "You could have heard a souffle drop." The room went absolutely silent for a moment, before one of the more sane (yet, of course, very white) RNs present, said, sardonically, "It ain't?"

"Oh no! My cover's blown!" I said, and everyone seemed to relax. A strange, strained moment, but then it was as though nothing had happened and the debate resumed.

I've been told (by a square-state woman who was once romantically interested in me) "You're the blackest man I've ever met." This from a woman with an almost-fatal attraction to Karl Malone. These things always make me uncomfortable, just as the coronation of Bill Clinton as America's "first black President" did. I understand it but that doesn't make it any easier to react with non chalance.

I am only what I am, in my own mind, but I realize what I am would come across a good deal differently were it not for my having grown up both southern, Irish and black. Odd for a grey-green, nearly translucent white guy? Not really. Not where I come from.

I look forward with the greatest interest to reading Gross' book. I'm sure it will do nothing to dispel my notion that the majority of westerners -- and perhaps the entire human race -- is nuts, but it may at least give me some solace when I start feeling like some sort of weed in the garden of life.

Fortunately, back here in the DC area, it's a lot easier to be a weed. And you can make one hell of a nice lawn out of crabgrass, by the way.

I haven't yet read the article, but the artwork captured my imagination, and the theme of the piece plays so well into the article, that I had to give proper respect. It's truly inspired, and I'd love to see what colors the community can come up with to fill out the portrait!

You should interview Frank W. Sweet, author of LEGAL HISTORY OF THE COLOR LINE. His book is probably better than the one by Ariela Gross.

Americans changed their concept of “race” many times. Eston Hemings, Jefferson’s son, was socially accepted as a White Virginian because he looked European. Biracial planters in antebellum South Carolina assimilated into White society because they were rich. Intermarried couples were acquitted despite the laws because some courts ruled that anyone one with less than one-fourth African ancestry was White, while others ruled that Italians were Colored. Dozens of nineteenth-century American families struggled to come to grips with notions of “racial” identity as the color line shifted and hardened into its present form.

This 542-page book tells their stories in the light of genetic admixture studies and in the records of every appealed court case since 1780 that decided which side of the color line someone was on. Its index lists dozens of 19th-century surnames. It shows that: The color line was invented in 1691 to prevent servile insurrection. The one-drop rule was invented in the North during the Nat Turner panic. It was resisted by Louisiana Creoles, Florida Hispanics, and the maroon (triracial) communities of the Southeast. It triumphed during Jim Crow as a means of keeping Whites in line by banishing to Blackness any White family who dared to establish friendly relations with a Black family. This analysis of the nearly 300 appealed court cases that determined Americans’ “racial” identity may be the most thorough study of the legal history of the U.S. color line yet published.

Frank W. Sweet is the author of Legal History of the Color Line (ISBN 9780939479238), an analysis of the nearly 300 appealed cases that determined Americans’ “racial” identity over the centuries. It is the most thorough study of the legal history of this topic yet published. He was accepted to Ph.D. candidacy in history with a minor in molecular anthropology at the University of Florida in 2003 and has completed all but his dissertation defense. He earned an M.A. in History from American Military University in 2001.

http://www.amazon.com/Legal-History-Color-Line-One-drop/dp/0939479230/ref=pd