One Good Thing Trump Caused

 Donald Trump sneered at Kamala Harris identifying as black. That was the good thing he did since that got Teresa Wiltz to write What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Race in America.

Her essay dismantled and explained blackness in America.

For most of its history, America decreed that anyone with any African ancestry was Black — and rumors of purported Blackness could derail a career, a marriage, a life. Now, the irony is that some feel comfortable accusing those same people of making up their Blackness altogether — or not being “fully Black” if they come from multiple racial backgrounds.

But the problem with trying to decide who qualifies as Black and who doesn’t is that there are many, many ways to be Black in America, thanks largely to slavery.

I remember Rush Limbaugh saying that blacks were racists because there was a black Chambers of Commerce. Poor reasoning and historical ignorance never embarrassed old Rush. One of several reasons I despised the man.

It was not black racism that created parallel African-American organizations - it was white racism. Blacks could not join the Freemasons, so they created their own Masonic organization.

The average African American has about a quarter European ancestry. But some of us are a little more miscegenated than others. In my family, for example, DNA results from different members have ranged from 49-70 percent European. One of my besties, who is a very fair-skinned, biracial Black woman, is afraid to get her DNA tested for fear she’ll be less than 10 percent Black — even though her identity is firmly African American.

But for most of American history, “mixed” just wasn’t an option. Thanks to the one drop rule, if you had any African ancestry, even if you had blonde hair and blue eyes and white skin, that made you legally Black in America’s racial caste system — and subject to the brutality of slavery and Jim Crow laws and all the other indignities of second-class citizenship.

In other words, in this country, whiteness has long been defined by the absence of Blackness. But Blackness has never been defined by the absence of whiteness. Many of the biggest Black political figures in the U.S. are visibly mixed race — most, like me, the result of multiple generations of amalgamating: Frederick Douglass. Booker T. Washington. W.E.B. DuBois. Walter White of the NAACP. Rosa Parks. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Malcolm X. Angela Davis. Reps. Harold Ford Sr. and Harold Ford Jr. Sen. Cory Booker…

Being Black in America, that is, being Black with roots in antebellum America, has less to do with skin tone and everything to do with the legacy of slavery. And that legacy of forced servitude — and forced sex — isn’t a pretty story to tell. Americans tend to have amnesia about this less-than-savory aspect of our history, as if race-mixing in America didn’t commence until 1967, when the Supreme Court said it was OK, in Loving v. Virginia.

 Maybe we whites are still frightened of a black planet; maybe we are trying to hide our shame at our racism. We need to get over both. Orthodox Christianity says we are all icons of Christ. That forbids racism. If we are ashamed of our racism, then it is time to put that aside. Americans like to think we are a big people, surely we can overcome the racism that undermines our greatness. Go read the whole of the essay, I hope it will make you think. I cannot, however, resist this last quote:

 We’re all humans, living on this rock we call Earth, making shit up as we go along. It’s our nature to taxonomize people, to put them into neat little categories as if that will explain their existence to us — and where they belong on the totem pole.

sch 8/4