“As a practical matter, if the black ancestry is so trivial as to leave no meaningful physical traces I suspect that it sometimes fades out of sight and the person in question actually becomes white.”
It should be a functional test like the “Turing Test” — if a reasonable observer thinks you are white then you are “white.” At least for the binary “social constructed” definition.
Michael asks, Was your dad a G.I.? “G.I.” is a nickname for a United States soldier. Michael observes Karen’s apparent mixed ethnicity and implies that Karen’s father served in an exotic location and fathered a child with a local woman.
Happy? Of course. The case and how it’s often used as solid proof of quite an extraordinary claim is just a bit of a pet peeve.
I’ve known a couple of WM/BF couples, where the women were West Indian and Sub Saharan African. One had children who were pretty dark, most people would say they were black. The other couple’s child is still a baby and cafe-au-lait. Do they get darker as they grow?
“Other responses pointed to the ways that racial categories continue to shape our collective thinking….That so much of the discussion circulated around Thompson’s and Negga’s ability to successfully pass as white felt surreal, a return to a type of racial scrutiny that seems antithetical to the project of both the book and its adaptation.”
When you look at Latinos and Arabs, the USA never really had a “one drop rule.” It was more of a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. Even in the South, it was not unusual for a white family to be known to have some “black blood” but they were treated like other whites as long as they behaved as whites were expected to behave.
Your original comment upthread said that Negga played Ophelia, and: “Plus it had a mixed race Laertes & Ophelia.” Since you had already referred to Negga playing Ophelia, this confused me. Did you mean that there was another female part that was played by a mixed-race actress?
How you identify has both a biological and a cultural component. A person who is 1/8th black may not look very black, but they’ll usually have family members who remember the black great-grandparent.
“If you’re basing this on the images that show up when you google her brothers, neither the Leon or the Adrian in those images are Sandra’s brothers.”
I his explanation saw Ruth Negga as Ophelia in ‘Hamlet’ at the National Theatre in London. I didn’t think she really stood out but on the other hand it’s a thankless role.
This is particularly true of the Elizabethan theater which was pretty closely related to the dumb show in which performers would have worn masks (a type of which is performed during Hamlet) and which had mainly imaginary scenery (pelo need to build and change sets). Characters address the audience in soliloquies which the other characters can’t hear, so there is clearly a world outside of what’s strictly happening on stage.
I agree to a point. But racial pride is far healthier than the sickly masochism that so many white people have now.
She would receive their help, the letter said, only if she vowed never to see her 79-year-old mother again and only if she promised to keep quiet about her family history.