10/8/2014 Color Lines by Eubanks

10/8/2014 Color Lines by Eubanks

So when the author was a young child, found a picture of a man in the back of his parent's closet .  He didn't find out until later that the white man in the picture was his grandfather.  So he grew up identifying himself and his family as black, however, his mother was actually half white.

He talks about how when his mother was growing up she had potential to pass as a white person, her black mother had passed away and her white grandfather could have moved them and they could all have "passed as white".  But grandpa decided not to move and hide their mixed racial identity and although his mother's birth certificate said "white" she grew up identifying as black and going to black schools.

He also grew up in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s "where the idea of race and identity determined who you were and your place in the world--you were either black or white".  Also "Claiming mixed status meant you were either trying to be white (implying that black was inferior) or trying to pass for white (a dangerous business few spoke of openly) and doing so carried the risk of being labeled a racial traitor."

His mother never tried to "pass", in fact she got very upset when she saw one of her old school-mates who was working in a job a black man could never get.  She was so angry because "she saw this man as a traitor of the highest order.  He had turned back on the philosophy of racial uplift he had been taught at Tuskegee; the oppressed had assumed the role of oppressor."

So later he gets his DNA tested and he was really impacted by this.  The study he was part of showed that we are all so similar DNA wise and that most all of us identify as a race, but we are all mixed and have lots of "races" that are part of us.

So then he talks to his son about getting tested and he does.  However, his son isn't all the excited about the results.  Again the test showed nothing too crazy, but his son really didn't think about race the same way his father had.  He told his father, "they don't change the way I think of myself or the way I view the world.  When people ask me, 'what are you?' I generally tell them that I am American.  And given how diverse my background is, it's in my way of thinking, a background that could only come about in America.

Crazy fact: Alabama removed the constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage only in 2000, with 40 percent of Alabamians voting to keep the prohibition in place.

With Hispanics moving into America, it has made the "white" and "black" racial identities difficult as they fit into neither category.