#7 yo

Hey so I loved this discussion because I feel like we actually got to a point that we were able to address some of the grey areas of race. We started by listening to a couple of podcasts, one of which featured a woman who was 1/16th black but considered herself black. As a result, we started talking about how we agreed when the woman said that she doesn’t think that you should deny that part of yourself, even though one of her daughters identifies as white and the other identifies as black. I think that our discussion really got interesting once we started questioning whether identifying as black even though she’s only 1/16th black means that she’s also denying the white part of herself. It seems to me that a lot of mixed-race people identify as whichever race is the most outwardly visible i.e. Obama identifies as black even though he’s biracial, yet at the same time, I think that most of my biracial friends would say both their races when asked. When it comes down to it, your race is however you choose to identify, so the woman in the podcast has every right to identify as black even though she’s only 1/16th black. That being said, I raised the question of why it’s okay for her to identify as black when we tend to laugh at white people who claim to be Native American because they are 1/16th Cherokee, which really provoked a lot of questions about the grey areas in race, passing for white, and how we choose to identify. All in all, although we never really reached a conclusion, I think that it was nice to directly address those issues and recognize that despite humans’ affinity for categorization, it cannot always be that simple. I miss having this kind of group discussion.

Well...  He didn't eat her.