"One drop" on a hot-button issue: racism

Barack Obama is the first black US president, Halle Berry was the first black woman to receive an Oscar for Best Actress, and Colin Powell was the nation's first black Secretary of State. Were they, really? Obama and Berry both have caucasian mothers, and Powell has, courtesy of his Scottish ancestry, a lighter skin tone than a beach bum on the Jersey shore. Why do we see them as "black", although they are just as equally "white"? Because we may live in the 21st century, but we still keep an age-old racial hierarchy in our minds, which reserves the top rung for caucasians, labeling all other "races" as inferior and, consequently, as contaminants. And that is not just my personal opinion, but the conclusion in a paper on Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals, which appears in the most recent issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

I must confess: I had never heard of hypodescent before and had to look it up:

Hypodescent is the rule that automatically assigns the children of a mixed union or mating between members of different socioeconomic groups in the less privileged group.

This is also known as the one drop rule, and it is more than just one of many racial prejudices still prevalent today: it was written into law in 1662 in the Virginia colony and remained on the books for centuries; it was the basis for laws against intermarriage; and as late as 1985, it was essentially confirmed by the US Supreme Court: The highest US court had let stand, in the case of Jane Doe v. Louisiana, that Suzy Phipps could not legally change her (in her view erroneous) racial identification from black to white.

And this notion that one drop of "inferior" blood leads to a "contamination" of "white blood" (my apologies for all the quotation marks - but from my German point of view, such racial labeling, although widely accepted here in the US, seems extremely questionable and makes me very uncomfortable), is still widespread, according to the research of James Sidanius, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and his co-authors Mahzarin Banaji, Arnold K. Ho, Ph.D. student of psychology at Harvard, and Daniel T. Levin at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. They used a series of computer-generated images, morphing white and black as well as white and Asian faces (ranging from 5 percent white to 95 percent white); the 50-50 mix of two races was practically never identified as white - to be considered caucasian, black-white biracial images had to be at least 68 percent "white" (Asian-white required "only" 63 percent "white").

There is one conclusion which I would dare to question, though:

The team found few differences in how whites and non-whites perceive biracial individuals, with both assigning them with equal frequency to lower-status groups.

It's the "lower status" reference that I find questionable in this context, at least when it refers to the minority views: It might also express some kind of ethnic pride, when an Afroamerican choses to label a face "black", although it is predominantly "white" - it should not be interpreted as demeaning to him to be perceived as black. Although, quite honestly, I know that even in today's society, this view might still qualify me as naive.

Ein Tropfen auf das "heiße Eisen" des Rassismus

One thing that I am not talking about in my original German-language post (see above link), is that in the United States, racism - which is not automatically identical with racial discrimination - is still an acceptable and accepted concept. We are constantly required to identify ourselves by race, be it in the Census, or on government applications, or whatnot (as a non-citizen, I am not privy to all the paperwork requirements that Americans have to endure). This concept seems even odder to us Germans (and, I might add, given our history, it should be) - we actually don't use the word "race" for human beings. Our word "Rasse" would be correctly translated as "breed", and as such it applies only to domesticated animals. You need proof? Search "Menschenrassen" on Wikipedia.de (I know, that doesn't really prove anything, but it'll do for now), and you will be redirected to the subject of "Rassentheorie", which, right in the first line, is decribed as "heute als überholt angesehene Theorien" - theories that are now considered outdated.

Which doesn't mean that there is no ethnic discrimination in Germany; sadly, the issue received an unexpected boost with a book by former Deutsche Bank executive Thilo Sarrazin, who received not only (well deserved) criticism, but sadly also a lot of applause for his theory, published in his book "Deutschland schafft sich ab" (Germany dooes away with itself), that Muslim immigrants are culturally, intellectually, and genetically inferior. A stupid, unfounded, revolting, disgusting (add more words of contempt here: ______) view - but terrifyingly populistic, too.