Someone recently asked on Facebook:

This is not my political opinion one way or another except why is a mixed race person called black. Why is someone’s race mentioned at all. We don’t say White president elect. And most of us are mixed. Should we name our family tree? This confuses me.

These are really good questions regardless of political opinion. It’s a matter of history.  Perhaps I, a southern white male of 72 years can provide some prospective and context.

When I was a boy we generally did not use the word Black. We called these folks colored. The vestige of this somewhat antiquated expression is seen in the full translation of the acronym NAACP – the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was founded in 1909 in response to violence against non-white people.

This was the era of KKK activity. Lynchings. Strict segregation laws. The erection of Confederate monuments.

Approximately 40 years later, I was born into an intentionally segregated South. As a young white child, I learned to look carefully at the labels on water fountains, the designations on public bathroom facilities, and the signage on Doctor’s office waiting rooms. It was White or non-white. Those were the clear choices, except the non-white person was consistently called Colored.

My world was a white world, the only “inconvenient” exception being those other people, the colored ones, whose lives were carefully regulated. Inter-racial marriages were generally illegal. In the pejorative terminology of that day, in those cases where the white bloodline of a family was “tainted” by an inter-racial relationship, the purity of the white bloodline was protected by assigning the “amalgamated” person to the non-white world. The “one-drop rule” was in effect. One drop of “Negro blood” (as if there were really such a thing) and you were “colored”.

In time, partially as a way of embracing their ethnic identity rather than being shamed by it, the word Black came into popular use, as well as African-American.

Literally speaking, nobody is really Black, just some intensity of Brown – just as no one is literally White, but somewhat ivory to olive.

Clearly there is a certain arbitrary nature about these labels, which the questioner cited above was keying in on. Nonetheless this arbitrary and over-generalized system of classifying people has been with us for many years.

It was designed to create an American caste-system, in which certain non-white others were expected to “keep their place”. A person of color (formerly called colored) was initially intended to be enslaved, to be owned as property by “white people” (the other main classification) who clearly considered themselves to be superior.

Then their position was altered somewhat, yet enslaved nonetheless by Jim Crow rules – that legislation designed to prevent “the colored” from improving themselves, whether educationally or economically.

It does little good to try suddenly to assume a “non-racial” linguistic posture and act as if these things never happened. For me, this is simply “us whitefolk” trying to “forget” the generations of injustice afflicted by one “race” against another, while denying the consequences of arbitrary racial labeling in support of white superiority.

While “whiteness” was dominant, “blackness” was the exception. So, unless otherwise indicated, “whiteness” was assumed. Only in relatively recent years do I refer to myself as a “white male”; as I try to step out of  the “white bubble” in which I was raised. But in that bubble, it is only necessary to identify the non-white folk, those colored others.

Do we really expect a person of mixed racial constitution and of African descent to not identify as “colored”, non-white,  or Black, when white society has so identified them all their lives?