One drop of blood

Does one drop of blood matter? It all depends on the color of the drop, it would seem. A commentary on interracial matters I make in The Joys of Teaching Literature:

There is some sad irony in the "posthumous" victory of the "one-drop of blood" convention, which despite being totally absurd in logical or biological terms, still applies in social and cultural terms, sometimes where you would least expect it, and usually out of ethnic solidarity. For instance, Obama "self-identifies" as black, in spite of the fact that he was raised by his white mother and by her family in a non-African-American environment. And despite the fact that from an 'objective' viewpoint, the statement that he is 'the first Black President of the USA' makes no more sense than saying that he is 'the 44th white president of the USA'. Halle Berry recently firmly stated her belief in the one-drop convention, which of course applies only to drops of black blood.  And so on. There is no lack of people willing to perpetuate the racist myths in one form or another.

Note that Obama was raised by his mother in Hawaii and in Indonesia, and later by his white maternal grandparents. He is not the first Black president of the USA if Black means, as it often does, “a child of the African-American community descended from slaves brought from Africa”. There’s another historical irony for you, that the first Black president should not have been all that ‘Black’ in the ethnic sense of the word, and not much more so in the biological sense.

Nazism where you expected it least

—oOo—