brownstudies said:
To Americans: when you see a mixed-race person of Afro-Caribbean/White European descent, do you class them as mixed race, or black?
I ask this because as a mixed race person myself, I've noticed that a lot of Americans don't seem to recognise it as an identity in it's own right; they are more likely to class that person according to what they physically resemble the most, i.e. tanned skin and coarse dark hair = black. This is really putting me off moving to America as I'm worried that I'm going to be given a new identity that I can't relate to.
Famed African American poet Langston Hughes said "You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word 'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown"
In the United States we don't really believe in multiple races for one person. We go off of a "you look it you are it", part of our one-drop rule. Long story.
Back in the day the South had slavery. And on top of kidnapping, murdering and selling the children of their slaves they also raped the female slaves, very frequently. As a result there were a lot of 50/50 kids. These 50/50 kids would not be freed by their white fathers and would stay in servitude. Culturally, black slaves saw these 50/50 children as black since they stayed with their mother and grew up withing the black community, and these 50/50 kids were not seen as white because they did not grow up with their white father and live in their culture (mild speculation on my part). Since race was the justification of slavery, and owner's didn't want to free their profitable and sell able 50/50 offspring the laws were made say that any person with any black ancestry of any percentage (or extremely low in some states) was to be officially recognized as black, and thus a slave. These 50/50 kids might have been mildly resented withing the black slave community at the time (speculation on my part) but then those children would grow up and be raped by their owners or would marry a fellow black or partially black slave, resulting in a child that could have any mix of white and black. When combined with the fact that plantation owners not wanting to admit who their children were, slave mothers not wanting to talk about the father, children being sold away while extremely young and few birth records of slaves means that it is extremely hard for slaves to know their true racial makeup. Long story short, by the time the Civil War was over just about every slave had at least some percentage of white in them, but slaves, white people and the law did not care. When Jim Crow laws began to take effect the old laws about having "one-drop" was used to make sure that people with any percentage of black were discriminated against. If one had even a little bit of black in them they were considered black and were treated as such, legally and culturally by both African Americans and whites.
Notable examples include Frederick Douglas who states in his biography that his master was also his father and as such is 50% white and 50% black. Actually, I take that back, he never had much communication with his mom, who for all I know could have been 80% black 20% white or something else. So there is a chance that Frederick Douglas is more white than black.
Tiger Woods is the most extreme example. He is 1/4 black, 1/8 white (Dutch), 1/8 Native American and 1/2 Asian. So yea, he is twice as Asian as he is black. But since Americans use "you look it you are it" they see that black is his most visible trait and declare him black.
President Obama is another example. He is rare in that we know for sure that he is exactly 50% white and 50% black. Note that he is considered black despite this, and that his skin tone is very similar to that of other African Americans in America.
My Colombian dad says that it is weird how Americans view race. In Colombia they had slavery, but there was far less interracial mixing and as such their Afrian-Colombian population has very little white in it. But if an Afro-Colombian marries a white Colombian the child is considered Mulatto because there is a clear distinction between the black, white and mixed. Oddly, they have a reverse one-drop rule on top of that. If you have a small amount of white in you than you are considered white (while still also being Mulatto). My dad will turn on news and be confused when they refer to black people to which he responds "what are they hiding behind the white people?"
To answer your question. On paper you will be considered mixed (have to look up the specifics per state but modern laws are more logical), but to virtually every American you will be considered 100% black. If you try to say that you are Afro-Caribbean/White European you will just be wasting your time because the concept of mixed races is just something that we culturally do not use or that we care about. As for your African ancestry being from the Caribbean, that is something Americans will take note of and possible find cool. If you have a trace of a Jamaican/Haitian/Dominican Republic accent (but I assume you are living in Britian right now so how would I know) they might find that interesting little factoid to know about but of little real consequence.
But don't British people use the same you-look-it-you-are-it thought process when you just look at someone that we Americans use? Do British people use the terms Mulatto, Chicano (part Hispanic part white), etc or is it an all or nothing?
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