(no subject)

[stormdog]

This is fascinating. On NPR right now, there's a piece about a town in Ohio where everyone is black. Except that heritage comes from far enough back in town that intermarrying with people of other ethnicities and lack of incoming new African-Americans has led to everyone in this town looking like they have no black ancestry. But the majority of the people in town steadfastly state that they are black. It's on the birth certificate of people who have pale skin, long red hair, and freckles. They're interviewing a family where there are two sisters, one of whom presents an identity as white, and one as black. They had very different experiences in school, socially, with their family. She would bring a boyfriend to meet her parents, for example, and there would be arguments with her parents about her racial identification and over the fact that she told her boyfriend that she's white when her parents (who also don't look African-descended) are black. And the whole thing is conceptual. Just conceptual. This is a town where the one-drop rule has been taken to its logical extreme.

This is a strong metaphor for the illogic of the sort of rigid categories of race that exist in the United States.

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http://www.prx.org/pieces/85361-pike-county-ohio-as-black-as-we-wish-to-be